
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap._U_L:"'Wopyright No,. 
Shelf..iV:.._._>^ 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA 



A SHORT HISTORY 



OF 



RUSSIA 



BY 

MARY PLATT PARMELE 

Author of "France," "England," "United States," 

"Germany," "Spain," "Who, When, 

and What?" etc. 



PUBLISHED FOR THE 

BAY VIEW READING CIRCLE 

Central Office, Flint, Mich. 
1899 



382/9 



Copyright, 1899, 

BY 
MARY PLATT PARMELE. 



fwaeo^jji*-. 



acsfvigo* 



^ 
^ 



V 




press of the 

Continental Publishing Co., 

24-26 Murray St., New York. 






PREFACE. 

If this book seems to have departed from 
the proper ideal of historic narrative — if it is 
the history of a Power, and not of a People — it 
is because the Russian people have had no 
history yet. There has been no evolution of 
a Russian nation, but only of a vast govern- 
ing system; and the words '' Russian Em- 
pire " stand for a majestic world-power in 
which the mass of its people have no part. A 
splendidly embroidered robe of Europeanism 
is worn over a chaotic, undeveloped mass of 
semi-barbarism. The reasons for this incon- 
gruity — the natural obstacles with which Rus- 
sia has had to contend; the strange ethnic 
problems with which it has had to deal; its 
triumphant entry into the family of great 
nations in which it stands second to none — 
such is the story this book has tried to tell. 

M. P. P. 
New York, June, 1899. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

Natural Conditions — Greek Colonies on the Black 
Sea — The Scythians — Ancient Traces of Sla- 
vonic Race, c I 

CHAPTER H. 

Hunnish Invasion — Distribution of Races — Slavonic 
Religion — Primitive Political Conceptions, . lo 

CHAPTER in. 

The Scandinavian in Russia — Rurik — Oleg — Igor — 
Olga's Vengeance — Olga a Christian — Sviatos- 
laf — Russia the Champion of the Greek Em- 
pire in Bulgaria — Norse Dominance in Heroic 
Period, 17 

CHAPTER IV. 

System of Appanages — Vladimir the Sinner Be- 
comes Vladimir the Saint — Russia Forcibly 
Christianized — Causes Underlying Antagonism 
Between Greek and Latin Church — Russia 
Joined to the Greek Currents and Separated 
from the Latin, . ... . . , ,26 

vii 



Vlll CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER V. 

PAGE 

Principalities — Headship of House of Rurik — Re- 
lation of Grand Prince to the Others — Civilizing 
Influences from Greek Sources — Cruelty not 
Indigenous with the Slavs — How and Whence 
it Came — Primitive Social Elements — The Dru- 
jina — End of Heroic Period — Andrew Bogo- 
liubski — New Political Center at Suzdal, . . 34 



CHAPTER VI. 

The Republic of Novgorod — Invasion of Baltic 
Provinces by Germans — Livonian and Teutonic 
Orders — Russian Territory Becomes Prussia — 
Mongol Invasion — Genghis Khan — Cause of 
Downfall, 41 



CHAPTER VII. 

The Rule of the Khans — Humiliation of Princes — 
Novgorod the Last to Fall — Alexander Nevski — 
Russia Under the Yoke, 51 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Lithuania — Its Union with Poland — A Conquest of 
Russia Intended — Daniel First Prince of Mos- 
cow — Moscow Becomes the Ecclesiastical 
Center — Power Gravitates Toward that State — 
Centralization — Dmitri Donskoi — Golden Horde 
Crumbling, 59 



CONTENTS. IX 

CHAPTER IX. 

PAGE 

Origin of Ottoman Empire — Turks in Constanti- 
nople — Moscow the Spiritual Heir to Byzantium 
— Ivan Married to a Daughter of the Caesars — 
Civilizing Streams Flowing into Moscow — 
Work for Ivan III.— And How He Did it- 
Friendly Relations with the Khans — Reply to 
Demand for Tribute in 1478 — The Yoke Broken, 70 

CHAPTER X. > 

Vasili the Blind— Fall of Pskof— Splendor of Court 
Ceremonial — Nature of Struggle which was 
Evolving, .78 

CHAPTER XI. 

Ivan IV. — His Childhood — Coup d' Etat — Unmask- 
ing of Adashef and Silvester — A Gentle Youth 
Developing into a Monster — Solicitude for the 
Souls of his Victims — Destruction of Novgo- 
rod — England Enters Russia by a Side Door — 
Friendship with Elizabeth — Acquisition of 
Siberia— The Sobor or States-General Sum- 
moned — Ivan Slays his Son and Heir — His 
Death, 85 

CHAPTER XII. 

Boris Godunof — The Way to Power — A Boyar Tsar 
of Russia — Serfdom Created — The False Dmitri 
— Mikhail the First Romanoff 96 



X CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

PAGE 

Time of Preparation — The Cossacks — Attempt of 
Nikon — Death of Mikhail — Alexis — Sympa- 
thizes with Charles II. — Natalia — Death of 
Alexis— Feodor, 104 

CHAPTER XIV. 

Sophia Regent — Peter I. — Childhood — Visit to 
Archangel — Azof Captured— How a Navy was 
Built — Sentiment Concerning Reforms — A 
Conspiracy Nipped in the Bud — Peter Aston- 
ishes Western Europe, iii 

CHAPTER XV. 

Charles XII. — Battle of Narva— St. Petersburg 
Founded — Mazeppa — Poltova — Peter's Marriage 
with Catherine, 104 

CHAPTER XVI. 

Campaign against Turks — Disaster Averted — 
Azof Relinquished — Treaty of Pruth — Re- 
forms — The Raskolniks — Visit to France — His 
Son Alexis a Traitor — His Death, . . . 132 

CHAPTER XVII. 

Catherine I. — Annalvanovna — Ivan VI. — Elizabeth 
Petrovna — French Influences Succeed the Ger- 
man — Peter III.— His Taking off — Catherine 
II., ..,,.,.,. 144 



CONTENTS. XI 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

PAGE 

Conditions in Poland — Victories in the Black Sea — 
Pugatchek the Pretender — Peasants' War — Re- 
forms — Partition of Poland — Characteristics of 
Catherine and of her Reign — Her Death, . 156 

CHAPTER XIX. 

Paul -I. — Napoleon Bonaparte — Franco-Rnssian 
Understanding — Assassination of Paul — Alex- 
ander I., 168 

CHAPTER XX. 

Plans for a Liberal Reign — Austerlitz — Alexander 
I. an Ally of Napoleon — Rupture of Friendship 
— French Army in Moscow — Its Retreat and 
Extinction — The Tsar a Liberator in Europe — 
Failure of Reforms — Araktcheef's Severities — 
Conspiracy at Kief — Death of Alexander I., . 175 

CHAPTER XXI. 

Constantine's Renunciation — Revolt — Succession 
of Nicholas 1. — Order Restored — Character of 
Nicholas — His Policy — Polish Insurrection — 
Reactionary Measures — Europe Excluded — 
Turco-Russian Understanding — Beginning of 
the Great Diplomatic Game — Nature of the 
Eastern Question— Intellectual Expansion in 
Russia, 187 

CHAPTER XXII. 

1848 in Europe— Nicholas Aids Francis Joseph — 
Hungary Subjugated — Nicholas claims to be 
Protector of Eastern Christendom— Attempt to 



\ 



xn CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Secure England's Co-operation — Russia's Griev- 
ance against Turkey — His Demands — France 
and England in Alliance for Defense of Sultan 
— Allied Armies in the Black Sea — The Crimean 
War — Odessa — Alma — Siege of Sevastopol — 
Death of Nicholas 1., 201 

CHAPTER XXni. 

Alexander II. — End of Crimean War — Reaction 
Toward Liberalism — Emancipation of Serfs — 
Means by which It was Effected — Patriarchal- 
ism Retained — Hopes Awakened in Poland — 
Rebellion — How it was Disposed of, . . 213 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

Reaction toward Severity — Bulgaria and the 
Bashi-Bazuks — Russia the Champion of the 
Balkan States — Turco-Russian War — Treaty of 
San Stefano — Sentiment in Europe — Congress 
of Berlin — Diplomatic Defeat of Russia — Wan- 
ing Popularity of Alexander II., . . . 222 

CHAPTER XXV. 

Emancipation a Disappointment — Social Discontent 
— Birth of Nihilism — Assassination of Alexander 
II. — The Peasants' Wreath — Alexander III. — 
A Joyless Reign — His Death, .... 229 

CHAPTER XXVI. 

Nicholas II. — Russification of Finland — Invitation 
to Disarmament — Brief Review of Conditions, 241 



A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA. 



CHAPTER I. 

The topography of a country is to some 
extent a prophecy of its future. Had there 
been no Mississippi coursing for three thou- 
sand miles through the North American Con- 
tinent, no Ohio and Missouri bisecting it 
from east to west, no great inland seas in- 
denting and watering it, no fertile prairies 
stretching across its vast areas, how differ- 
ent would have been the history of our own 
land. 

Russia is the strange product of strange 
physical conditions. Nature was not in im- 
petuous mood when she created this greater 
half of Europe, nor was she generous, except 
in the matter of space. She was slow, slug- 
gish, but inexorable. No volcanic energies 
threw up rocky ridges and ramparts in Ti- 
tanic rage, and then repentantly clothed them 
with lovely verdure as in Spain, Italy, and 



2 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

elsewhere. No hungry sea rushed in and 
tore her coast into fragments. It would seem 
to have been just a cold-blooded experiment in 
subjecting a vast region to the most rigorous 
and least generous conditions possible, leav- 
ing it unshielded alike from Polar winds in 
winter or scorching heat in summer, divesting 
it of beauty and of charm, and then casting 
this arid, frigid, torpid land to a branch of the 
human family as unique as its own habita- 
tion; separating it by natural and almost im- 
passable barriers from civilizing influences, 
and in strange isolation leaving it to work 
out its own problem of development. 

We have only to look on the map at the 
ragged coast-lines of Greece, Italy, and the 
British Isles to realize how powerful a fac- 
tor the sea has been in great civilizations. 
Russia, like a thirsty giant, has for centuries 
been struggling to get to the tides which so 
generously wash the rest of Europe. During 
the earlier periods of her history she had not 
a foot of seaboard; and even now she possesses 
only a meager portion of coast-line for such 
an extent of territory; one-half of this being, 
except for three months in the year, sealed up 
with ice. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 3 

But Russia is deficient in still another essen- 
tial feature. Every other European country 
possesses a mountain system which gives form 
and solidity to its structure. She alone has 
no such system. No skeleton or backbone 
gives promise of stability to the dull expanse 
of plains through which flow her great lazy 
rivers, with scarce energy enough to carry 
their burdens to the sea. Mountains she has, 
but she shares them with her neighbors; and 
the Carpathians, Caucasus, and Ural are sim- 
ply a continuous girdle for a vast inclosure of 
plateaus of varying altitudes,* and while else- 
where it is the office of great mountain ranges 
to nourish, to enrich, and to beautify, in this 
strange land they seem designed only to im- 
prison. 

It is obvious that in a country so destitute of 
seaboard, its rivers must assume an immense 
importance. The history, the very life of 
Russia clusters about its three great rivers. 
These have been the arteries which have nour- 
ished, and indeed created, this strange empire. 
The Volga, with its seventy-five mouths 
emptying into the Caspian Sea, like a lazy 

* In the Tatar language the word Ural signifies 
*' girdle." 



4 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

leviathan brought back currents from the 
Orient; then the Dnieper, flowing into the 
Black Sea, opened up that communication 
with Byzantium which more than anything 
else has influenced the character of Russian 
development; and finally, in comparatively 
recent times, the Neva has borne those long- 
sought civilizing streams from Western Eu- 
rope which have made of it a modern state 
and joined it to the European family of na- 
tions. 

It would seem that the great region we now 
call Russia was predestined to become one 
empire. No one part could exist without all 
the others. In the north is the zone of forests, 
extending from the region of Moscow and 
Novgorod to the Arctic Circle. At the ex- 
treme southeast, north of the Caspian Sea and 
at the gateway leading into Asia, are the 
Barren Steppes, unsuited to agriculture or 
to civilized living; fit only for the raising 
of cattle and the existence of Asiatic nomads, 
who to this day make it their home. 

Between these two extremes lie two other 
zones of extraordinary character, the Black 
Lands and the Arable Steppes, or prairies. 
The former zone, which is of immense extent. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 5 

is covered with a deep bed of black mold of 
inexhaustible fertility, which without manure 
produces the richest harvests, and has done 
so since the time of Herodotus, at which 
period it was the granary of Athens and of 
Eastern Europe. 

The companion zone, running parallel with 
this, known as the Arable Steppes, which 
nearly resembles the American prairies, is al- 
most as remarkable as the Black Lands. Its 
soil, although fertile, has to be renewed. But 
an amazing vegetation covers this great area 
in summer with an ocean of verdure six or 
eight feet high, in which men and cattle may 
hide as in a forest. It is these two zones in 
the heart of Russia that have fed millions of 
people for centuries, which make her now one 
of the greatest competitors in the markets of 
the world. 

It is easy to see the interdependence created 
by this specialization in production, and the 
economic necessity it has imposed for an un- 
divided empire. The forest zone could not 
exist without the corn of the Black Lands and 
the Prairies, nor without the cattle of the 
Steppes. Nor could those treeless regions 
exist without the wood of the forests. So it 



6 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIkE. 

is obvious that when Nature girdled this east^ 
ern half of Europe, she marked it for one vast 
empire; and when she covered those monot- 
onous plateaus with a black mantle of ex- 
traordinary fertility, she decreed that the Rus- 
sians should be an agricultural people. And 
when she created natural conditions unmiti- 
gated and unparalleled in severity, she or- 
dained that this race of toilers should be 
patient and submissive under austerities; that 
their pulse should be set to a slow, even 
rhythm, in harmony with the low key in which 
Nature spoke to them. 

It is impossible to say when an Asiatic 
stream began to pour into Europe over the 
arid steppes north of the Caspian. But we 
know that as early as the fifth century B. C. 
the Greeks had established trading stations on 
the northern shores of the Black Sea, and that 
these in the fourth century had become flour- 
ishing colonies through their trade with the 
motley races of barbarians that swarmed about 
that region, who by the Greeks were indis- 
criminately designated by the common name 
of Scythians. 

The Greek colonists, who always carried 
with them their religion, their Homer, their 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 7 

love of beauty, and the arts of their mother 
cities, estabhshed themselves on and about the 
promontory of the Crimea, and built their city 
of Chersonesos where now is Sebastopol. 
They first entered into wars and then alliances 
with these Scythians, who served them as 
middle-men in trade with the tribes beyond, 
and in time a Graeco-Scythian state of the 
Bosphorus came into existence. 

Herodotus in the fifth century wrote much 
about these so-called Scythians, whom he 
divides into the agricultural Scythians, pre- 
sumably of the Black Lands, and the nomad 
Scythians, of the Barren Steppes. His ex- 
travagant and fanciful pictures of those bar- 
barians have long been studied by the curious; 
but light from an unexpected source has been 
thrown upon the subject, and Greek genius 
has rescued for us the type of humanity first 
known in Russia. 

There are now in the museum at St. Peters- 
burg two priceless works of art found in re- 
cent years in a tomb in Southern Russia. 
They are two vases of mingled gold and silver 
upon which are wrought pictures more faith- 
ful and more eloquent than those drawn by 
Herodotus. These figures of the Scythians, 



8 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

drawn probably as early as 400 B. C, repro- 
duce unmistakably the Russian peasant of 
to-day. The same bearded, heavy-featured 
faces; the long hair coming from beneath the 
same peaked cap; the loose tunic bound by 
a girdle; the trousers tucked into the boots, 
and the general type, not alone distinctly 
Aryan, but Slavonic. And not only that; we 
see them breaking in and bridling their horses, 
in precisely the same way as the Russian peas- 
ant does to-day on those same plains. As- 
suredly the vexed question concerning the 
Scythians is in a measure answered; and we 
know that some of them at least were Sla- 
vonic. 

But the passing illumination produced by 
the approach of Greek civilization did not 
penetrate to the region beyond, where was a 
tumbling, seething world of Asiatic tribes and 
peoples, Aryan, Tatar, and Turk, more or less 
mingled in varying shades of barbarism, all 
striving for mastery. 

This elemental struggle was to resolve itself 
into one between Aryan and non-Aryan — the 
Slav and the Finn; and this again into one be- 
tween the various members of the Slavonic 
family; then a life-and-death struggle with 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 9 

Asiatic barbarism in its worst form (the 
Mongol), with Tatar and Turk always remain- 
ing as disturbing factors. 

How, and the steps by which, the least pow- 
erful branch of the Slavonic race obtained the 
mastery and headship of Russia and has come 
to be one of the leading powers of the earth, 
is the story this book will try to tell. 



CHAPTER II. 

In speaking of this eastern half of Europe 
as Russia, we have been borrowing from the 
future. At the time we have been consider- 
ing there was no Russia. The world into 
which Christ came contained no Russia. The 
Roman Empire rose and fell, and still there 
was no Russia. Spain, Italy, France, and 
England were taking on a new form of life 
through the infusion of Teuton strength, and 
modern Europe was coming into being, and 
still the very name of Russia did not exist. 
The great expanse of plains, with its medley 
of Oriental barbarism, was to Europe the 
obscure region through which had come the 
Hunnish invasion from Asia. 

This catastrophe was the only experience 
that this land had in common with the rest of 
Europe. The Goths had established an em- 
pire where the ancient Grseco-Scythians had 
once been. The overthrowing of this Gothic 
Empire was the beginning of Attila's Euro- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. n 

pean conquests; and the passage of the Hun- 
nish horde, precisely as in the rest of Europe, 
produced a complete overturning. A torrent 
of Oriental races, Finns, Bulgarians, Magyars, 
and others, rushed in upon the track of the 
Huns, and filled up the spaces deserted by the 
Goths. Here as elsewhere the Hun com- 
pleted his appointed task of a rearrangement 
of races; thus fundamentally changing the 
whole course of future events. Perhaps there 
would be no Magyar race in Hungary, and 
certainly a different history to write of Russia, 
had there been no Attila in 375 B. C. 

The old Roman Empire, which in its decay 
had divided into an Eastern and a Western 
Empire (in the fourth century), had by the 
fifth century succumbed to the new forces 
which assailed it, leaving only a glittering 
remnant at Byzantium. 

The Eastern or Byzantine Empire, rich in 
pride and pretension, but poor in power, was 
destined to stand for one thousand years more, 
the shining conservator of the Christian re- 
ligion (although in a form quite different from 
the Church of Rome) and of Greek culture. 
It is impossible to imagine what our civiliza- 
tion would be to-day if this splendid fragment 



12 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

of the Roman Empire had not stood in shin- 
ing petrifaction during the ages of darkness, 
guarding the treasures of a dead past. 

While these tremendous changes were oc- 
curring in the West, unconscious as toiling 
insects the various peoples in Russia were pre- 
paring for an unknown future. The Bul- 
garians were occupying large spaces in the 
South. The Finns, who had been driven by 
the Bulgarians from their home upon the 
Volga, had centered in the Northwest near the 
Baltic, their vigorous branches mingled more 
or less with other Asiatic races, stretching 
here and there in the North, South, and East. 
The Russian Slavs, as the parent stem is 
called, were distributing themselves along a 
strip of territory running north and south 
along the line of the Dnieper; while the terri- 
ble Turks, and still more terrible Tatar tribes, 
hovered chiefly about the Black, the Caspian, 
and the Sea of Azof. No dream of unity had 
come to anyone. But had there been a fore- 
cast then of the future, it would have been said 
that the more finely organized Finn would be- 
come the dominant race; or perhaps the Bul- 
garian, who was showing capacity for empire- 
building; but certainly not that helpless Sla- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 13 

vonic people wedged in between their 
stronger neighbors. 

But there were no large ambitions yet. It 
meant nothing to them that there was a new 
" Holy Roman Empire," and that Charle- 
magne had been crowned at Rome successor 
of the Roman Caesars (800 A. D.); nor that 
an England had just been consolidated into 
one kingdom. Nor did it concern them that 
the Saracen had overthrown a Gothic empire 
in Spain (710). For them these things did 
not exist. But they knew about Constantino- 
ple. The Byzantine Empire was the sun which 
shone beyond their horizon, and was for them 
the supreme type of power and earthly splen- 
dor. Whatever ambitions and aspirations 
would in time awaken in these Oriental breasts 
must inevitably have for their ideal the splen- 
did despotism of the Eastern Caesars. But 
that stage had not yet been reached. 

Although branches of the Slavonic race had 
separated from the parent stem, bearing differ- 
ent names, the Bohemians on the Vistula, the 
Poliani in what was to become Poland, the 
Lithuanians near the Baltic, and minor tribes 
scattered elsewhere, from the Peloponnesus 
to the Baltic, all had the same general 



14 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 

characteristics. Their religion, Hke that of all 
Aryan peoples, was a pantheism founded upon 
the phenomena of nature. In their Pantheon 
there was a Volos, a solar deity who, like the 
Greek Apollo, was inspirer of poets and pro- 
tector of the flocks — Perun, God of Thunder 
— Stribog, the father of the Winds, like ^olus 
— a Proteus who could assume all shapes — 
Centaurs, Vampires, and hosts of minor dei- 
ties, good and evil. There were neither tem- 
ples nor priests, but the oak was venerated 
and consecrated to Perun; and rude idols of 
wood stood upon the hills, where sacrifices 
were ofifered to them and they were wor- 
shiped by the people. 

They believed that their dead passed into 
a future life, and from the time of the early 
Scythians it had been the custom to strangle 
a male and a female servant of the deceased to 
accompany him on his journey to the other 
land. The barbarity of their religious rites 
varied with the different tribes, but the gen- 
eral characteristics were the same, and the 
people everywhere were profoundly attached 
to their pagan ceremonies and under the do- 
minion of an intense form of superstition. 

Slav society was everywhere founded upon 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. IS 

the patriarchal principle. The father was ab- 
solute head of the family, his authority pass- 
ing undiminished upon his death to the oldest 
surviving member. This was the social unit. 

The Commune, or Mir, was only the expan- 
sion of the family, and was subject to the au- 
thority of a council, composed of the elders 
of the several families, called the vetcM, The 
village lands were held in common by this 
association. The territory was the common 
property of the whole. No hay could be cut 
nor fish caught without permission from the 
vetche. Then all shared alike the benefit of the 
enterprise. 

The communes nearest together formed a 
still larger group called a Volost; that is, a 
canton or parish, which was governed by a 
council composed of the elders of the com- 
munes, one of whom was recognized as the 
chief. Beyond this the idea of combination 
or unity did not extend. Such was the prim- 
itive form of society which was common to all 
the Slavonic branches. It was communistic, 
patriarchal, and just to the individual. They 
had no conception of tribal unity, nor of a 
sovereignty which should include the whole. 
If the Slav ever came under the despotism of 



1 6 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

a Strong personal government, the idea must 
come from some external source; it must be 
imposed, not grow; for it was not indigenous 
in the character of the people. It would be 
perfectly natural for them to submit to it if it 
came, for they were a passive people, but they 
were incapable of creating it. 



CHAPTER III. 

The Russian Slavs were an agricultural, not 
a warlike, people. They fought bravely, but 
naked to the waist, and with no idea of mili- 
tary organization, so were of course no match 
for the Turks, well skilled in the arts of war, 
nor for the armed bands of Scandinavian mer- 
chants, who made their territory a highway 
by which to reach the Greek provinces. All 
the Slav asked was to be permitted to gather 
his harvests, and dwell in his wooden towns 
and villages in peace. But this he could not 
do. Not only was he under tribute to the 
Khazarui (a powerful tribe of mingled Fin- 
nish and Turkish blood), and harried by the 
Turks, in the South; overrun by the Finns and 
Lithuanians in the North; but in his imperfect 
political condition he was broken up into 
minute divisions, canton incessantly at war 
with canton, and there could be no peace. 
The roving bands of Scandinavian traders 
and freebooters were alternately his perse- 
cutors and protectors. After burning his vil- 



l8 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

lages for some fancied offense, and appropriat- 
ing his cattle and corn, they would sell their 
service for the protection of Kief, Novgorod, 
and Pskof as freely as they did the same thing 
to Constantinople and the Greek cities. In 
other words, these brilliant, masterful intrud- 
ers were Northmen, and can undoubtedly be 
identified with those roving sea-kings who 
terrorized Western Europe for a long and 
dreary period. 

The disheartened Slavs of Novgorod came 
to a momentous decision. They invited these 
Varangians — as they are called — to come and 
administer their government. They said: 
" Our land is great and fruitful, but it lacks 
order and justice. Come — take possession, 
and govern us." With the arrival from 
Sweden of the three Vikings, Rurik and his 
two brothers Sineus and Truvor, the true his- 
tory of Russia begins, and the one thousandth 
anniversary of that event was commemorated 
at Novgorod in the year 1862. 

Rurik was the Clovis of Russia. When 
with his band of followers he was established 
at Novgorod the name of Russia came into ex- 
istence, supposedly from the Finnish word 
ruotsi, meaning rowers or sea-farers. Sla- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 19 

vonia was not only christened but regenerated 
at this period, and infused into it were the new 
elements of martial order, discipline, and the 
habit of implicit obedience to a chosen or 
hereditary chief; and as Rurik's brothers soon 
conveniently died, their territory also passed 
to him, and he assumed the title of Grand 
Prince. 

Upon the death of Ruric in 851, his younger 
brother Oleg succeeded him as regent during 
the minority of his son Igor; and when two 
more Varangian brothers — Askold and Dir 
— -in the same manner — except that they were 
not invited — took possession of Kief on the 
Dnieper and set up a rival principality in the 
South with ambitious designs upon Byzan- 
tium, Oleg promptly had them assassinated, 
added their territory to the dominion of Igor, 
and removed the capital from Novgorod to 
Kief — saying, " Let Kief be the mother of 
Russian cities! " Then after selecting a wife 
named Olga for the young Igor, he turned his 
attention toward Byzantium, the powerful 
magnet about which Russian policy was going 
to revolve for many centuries. 

So invincible and so wise w^as this Oleg 
that he was believed to be a sorcerer. When 



20 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

the Greek emperor blockaded the passage of 
the Bosphorus in 907, he placed his two 
thousand boats (!) upon wheels, and let the 
sails carry them overland to the gates of Con- 
stantinople. The Russian poet Pushkin has 
made this the subject of a poem which tells 
how Oleg, after exacting tribute from the 
frightened Emperor Leo VI., in true Norse 
fashion, hung his shield upon the golden gates 
as a parting insult. 

Again and again were the Greeks compelled 
to pay for immunity from these invasions of 
the Varangian princes. After the death of 
Oleg, Igor reigned, and in 941 led another ex- 
pedition against Constantinople which we are 
told was driven back by '' Greek-fire." Then 
enlisting the aid of the Pechenegs, a ferocious 
Tatar tribe, he returned with such fury, and 
inflicted such atrocities, that the Greek Em- 
peror begged for mercy and offered to pay any 
price to be left alone. The invaders said: " If 
Caesar speaks thus, what more do we want 
than to have gold and silver and silks without 
fighting." A treaty of peace was signed 
(945), the Russians swearing by their god 
Perum, and the Greeks by the Gospels; 
and the victorious Igor turned his face 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 21 

toward Kief. But he was never to reach that 
place. 

The DrevHans, the most savage of the Tatar 
tribes, had been forced to pay him a large 
tribute, and were meditating upon their re- 
venge. They said: '' Let us kill the wolf or 
we will lose the flock." They watched their 
opportunity, seized him, tied him to two 
young trees bent forcibly together; then, let- 
ting them spring apart, the son of Ruric was 
torn to pieces. 

No act of the wise regent Oleg was more 
fruitful in consequences than the choice of a 
wife for the young Igor. Olga, who acted as 
regent during the minority of her son, was 
destined to be not only the heroine of the 
Epic Cycle in Russia, but the first apostle of 
Christianity in that heathen land; canonized 
by the Church, and remembered as '' the first 
Russian who mounted to the Heavenly King- 
dom." 

When the Drevlians sent gifts to appease 
her wrath at the murder of Igor, and offered 
her the hand of their prince, she had the mes- 
sengers buried alive. All she asked was three 
pigeons and three sparrows from every house 
in their capital town. Lighted tow was tied 



22 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

to the tails of the birds, which were then per- 
mitted to fly back to their homes under the 
eaves of the thatched houses. In the confla- 
gration which followed, the inhabitants were 
massacred in a pleasing variety of ways: some 
strangled, some smothered in vapor, some 
buried alive, and those remaining reduced to 
slavery. 

But an extraordinary transformation was at 
hand; and this vindictive heathen woman was 
going to be changed to an ardent convert to 
the Christian faith. Nestor, who is the Rus- 
sian Herodotus, relates that she went to Con- 
stantinople in 955, to inquire into the mys- 
teries of the Christian Church. The emperor 
was astonished, it is said, at the strength and 
adroitness of her mind. She was baptized by 
the Greek Patriarch, under the new name of 
Helen, the emperor acting as her god- 
father. 

There were already a few Christians in Kief, 
but so unpopular was the new religion that 
Olga's son Sviatoslaf, upon reaching his ma- 
jority, absolutely refused to make himself 
ridiculous by adopting his mother's faith. 
** My men will mock me," was his reply to 
Olga's entreaties, and Nestor adds '' that he 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 23 

often became furious with her " for her im- 
portunity. 

Sviatoslaf, the son of Igor and Olga, al- 
though the first prince to bear a Russian 
name, was the very type of the cunning, am- 
bitious, and intrepid Northman, and his 
brief reign (964-972) displayed all these 
qualities. He defeated the Khazarui, the 
most civilized of all those Oriental people, and 
once the most powerful. He subjugated the 
Pechenegs, perhaps the most brutal and least 
civilized of all the barbarians. But these 
were only incidental to his real purpose. 

The Bulgarian Empire was large, and had 
played an important part in the past. It had 
a Tsar, while Russia had only a Grand Prince, 
and, although now declining in strength, was 
a troublesome neighbor to the Greek Empire. 
The oft-repeated mistake of inviting the aid of 
another people was committed. Nothing 
could have better pleased Sviatoslaf than to 
assist the Greek Empire, and when he cap- 
tured the Bulgarian capital city on the Dan- 
ube, and even talked of making it his own 
capital instead of Kief, it looked as if a great 
Slav Empire was forming with its center 
almost within sight of Constantinople. The 



24 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

Greeks were dismayed. With the Russians in 
the Balkan Peninsula, the center of their do- 
minions upon the Danube — with the Scythian 
hordes in the South ready to do their bidding 
— and with scattered Slavonic tribes from 
Macedon to the Peloponnesos gravitating 
toward them, what might they not do? No 
more serious danger had ever threatened the 
Empire of the East. They rushed to rescue 
Bulgaria from the very enemy they had invited 
to overthrow it. After a prolonged struggle, 
and in spite of the wild courage displayed by 
Sviatoslaf, he was driven back, and compelled 
to swear by Perun and Volos never again to 
invade Bulgaria. If they broke their vows, 
might they become '' as yellow as gold, and 
perish by their own arms." But this was for 
Sviatoslaf the last invasion of any land. The 
avenging Pechenegs were waiting in ambush 
for his return. They cut off his head and pre- 
sented his skull to their Prince as a drinking 
cup (972). 

It seems scarcely necessary to call attention 
to the fact that the transforming energy in 
this early period of Russian history was not 
in the native people; but that the Slav, in the 
hands of his Norse rulers, was as clay in the 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 25 

hands of the potter. In the treaty of peace 
signed at Kief (945) by the victorious Igor, 
of the fifty names recorded by Nestor only 
three were Slavonic and the rest Scandina- 
vian. There can be no doubt which was the 
dominant race in this the heroic age of Russia. 

So we have seen a weaker people submit- 
ting to the rule of a stronger, not by conquest, 
like Spain under the Visigoths; not overrun 
and overridden as Britain by the Angles and 
Saxons and Gaul by the Franks; but, in rec- 
ognition of its own helplessness, voluntarily 
becoming subject to the control of strangers. 

And we see at the same time the brilliant, 
restless Norseman, with no plan of establish- 
ing a racial dominion, but simply in the tem- 
porary enjoyment of his own warlike and rob- 
ber instincts, engrafting himself upon a less 
gifted people, and then adopting its language 
and customs, letting himself be absorbed into 
the nationality he has helped to create, and be- 
coming a Russian, with the same facility as 
Rollo and his sons at the very same period 
were becoming Frenchmen. 



CHAPTER IV. 

So the scattered clans of the Slav race were 
roughly drawn together into something re- 
sembling a nation by the strong arm of 
the Scandinavian. But the course of national 
progress is never a straight one. Nature un- 
derstands better than we the value of retard- 
ing influences, which prevent the too rapid 
fusing of crude elements. This work of re- 
tardation was performed for Russia by Svia- 
toslaf. When, instead of leaving his domin- 
ions to his oldest son, he divided them among 
the three, he introduced a vicious system 
which was to become a fatal source of weak- 
ness. This is known as the system of Appa- 
nages. To his son Yaropolk he gave Kief, to 
Oleg the territory of the Drevlians, and to 
Vladimir Novgorod. But as Vladimir quickly 
assassinated Yaropolk, who had already assas- 
sinated Oleg, the injurious results of the 
system were not directly felt! 

Vladimir became the sole ruler. He then 

26 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 27 

started upon a course of unbridled profli- 
gacy. He compelled the widow of his mur- 
dered brother to marry him — then a beautiful 
Greek nun who had been captured from 
Byzantium — then a Bulgarian and a Bohemian 
wife, until finally his household was num- 
bered by hundreds. But this sensual bar- 
barian began to be conscious of a soul. He 
was troubled, and revived the worship of the 
Slav gods; erected on the cliffs near Kief a 
new idol of Perun, with head of silver and 
beard of gold. Two Scandinavian Christians 
were by his orders stabbed at the feet of the 
idol. Still his soul was unsatisfied. He de- 
termined upon a search for the best religion; 
sent ambassadors to examine into the re- 
ligious beliefs of Mussulmans, Jews, Catho- 
lics, and the Greeks. The splendor of the 
Greek ceremonial, the magnificence of the 
vestments, the incense, the music, and the 
presence of the Emperor and his court, filled 
the souls of the barbarians with awe — and the 
final argument of his hoyars (or nobles) put 
an end to doubts: *' If the Greek religion had 
not been the best, your grandmother Olga, 
the wisest of mortals, would not have adopted 
it." 



28 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 

Vladimir's choice was made. He would be 
baptized in the faith of Olga. But this must 
be done at the hand of the Greek Patriarch; so 
he would conquer baptism — and ravish it like 
booty — not beg for it. He besieged and took 
a Greek city. Then demanded the hand of 
Anna, sister of the Greek Caesar, threatening 
in case of refusal to march on Constantinople. 
Consent was given upon condition of baptism, 
which was just what the barbarian wanted. 
So he came back to Kief a Christian, bring- 
ing with him his new Greek wife, and his new 
baptismal name of Basil. 

Amid the tears and fright of the people, the 
idols were torn down; Perun was flogged and 
thrown into the Dnieper. Then the old pa- 
gan stream was consecrated, and men, women, 
and children, old and young, master and slave, 
were driven into the river, the Greek priests 
standing on the banks reading the baptismal 
service. The frightened Novgorodians were 
in like manner forced to hurl Perun into the 
Volkhof, and then, like herded cattle, were 
driven into the stream to be baptized. The 
work of Olga was completed — Russia was 
Christianized (992)! 

It would be long before Christianity would 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 29 

penetrate into the heart of the people. As 
late as the twelfth century only the higher 
classes faithfully observed the Christian rites; 
while the old pagan ceremonies were still com- 
mon among the peasantry. And even now 
the Saints of the Calendar are in some places 
only thinly disguised heathen deities and pa- 
gan rites and superstitions mingle with Chris- 
tian observances. 

The conversion of Vladimir seems to have 
been sincere. From being a cruel voluptuary 
and assassin, he was changed to a merciful 
ruler who could not bear to inflict capital pun- 
ishment. He was faithful to his Greek wife 
Anna. On the spot where he had once 
erected Perun, and where the two Scandina- 
vians were martyred at his command, he built 
the church of St. Basil; and he is now re- 
membered only as the saint who Christianized 
pagan Russia, and revered as the '' Beautiful 
Sun of Kief." 

So the two most important events consid- 
ered thus far in the history of this land have 
been, first, its military conquest from the 
North, and second, its ecclesiastical conquest 
from the South. If the first helped it to be- 
come a nation, the second determined the 



3© EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

character which that nationaHty should as- 
sume. 

To explain one fact by another and unfa- 
miliar and uncomprehended fact is one of the 
confusing methods of history! In order to 
know why the adoption of the form of re- 
ligion known as the Greek Church so power- 
fully influenced Russian development, one 
must understand what that faith was and is, 
and the source of the antagonisms which di- 
vided the two great branches of the Church 
of Christ — the Greek and the Latin. 

The cause underlying all others is raciaL 
It is explained in their names. The theology 
of one had its roots in Greek Philosophy; that 
of the other in Roman Law. One tended to 
a brilliant diversity, the other to centralization 
and unity. One was a group of Ecclesiastical 
States, a Hierarchy and a Polyarchy, governed 
by Patriarchs, each supreme in his own dio- 
cese; the other was a Monarchy, arbitrarily 
and diplomatically governed from one center. 
It was the difference between an archipelago 
and a continent, and not unlike the difference 
between ancient Greece and Rome. One 
had the tremendous principle of growth, sta- 
bility, and permanence; the other had not. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 3^ 

Such were the race tendencies which led 
to entirely different ecclesiastical systems. 
Then there arose differences in dogma; and 
Rome considered the Church in the East 
schismatic, and Byzantium held that that 
of the West was heterodox. They now not 
only disapproved of each other's methods, but 
what was more serious, held different creeds. 
The Latin Church, after its Bishop had be- 
come an infallible Pope (about the middle of 
the fifth century), claimed that the Church in 
the East must accept his definition of dogma 
as final. 

It was one small word which finally rent 
these two bodies of Christendom forever 
apart. It was only the word Ulioque which 
made the impassable gulf dividing them. 
The Latins maintained that the Holy Spirit 
proceeded from the Father — and the son; the 
Greeks that it descended from the Father 
alone. It was the undying controversy con- 
cerning the relations and the attributes of the 
three Members of the Trinity; and the insolu- 
ble question was destined to break up Greek 
and Catholic Church alike into numberless 
sects and shades of belief or unbelief; and over 
this Christological controversy, rivers of blood 



32 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

were to flow in both branches of Christen- 
dom. 

The theological question involved was of 
course too subtle for ordinary comprehen- 
sion. But although men on both sides stood 
ready to die for the decisions of their councils 
which they did not understand, there was un- 
derlying the whole question the political jeal- 
ousy existing between the two: Byzantium, 
embittered by the effacement of its political 
jurisdiction in the West, exasperated at the 
overweening pretensions of Roman bishops; 
Rome, watching for opportunity to cajole or 
compel the Eastern Church to submit to her 
authority and headship. 

Such was the condition of things when Rus- 
sia allied herself in that most vital way with 
the empire in the East. It is impossible to 
measure the importance of the step, or to 
imagine what would have been the history of 
that country had Vladimir decided to accept 
the religion of Rome and become Catholic, as 
the Slav in Poland had already done. By 
his choice not only is it possible that he added 
some centuries to the life of the Greek Em- 
pire itself, but he determined the type of Rus- 
sian civilization. When she allied herself 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 33 

with Byzantium instead of Rome, Russia sepa- 
rated herself from those European currents 
from which she was already by natural and in- 
herited conditions isolated. She thus pro- 
longed and emphasized the Orientalism which 
so largely shaped her destiny, and produced 
a nationality absolutely unique in the family 
of European nations, in that there is hut one 
single root in Russia which can be traced 
hack to the Roman Empire; and whereas 
most of the European civilizations are built 
upon a Roman foundation, there is only one 
current in the life of that nation to-day which 
has flowed from a Latin source: that is a judi- 
cial code which was founded (in part) upon 
Roman law as embodied by Justinian, Empe- 
ror of the Empire in the East (527-565). 



CHAPTER V. 

When Vladimir died, in 1015, the partition 
of his dominions among numerous heirs in- 
augurated the destructive system oi Appanages. 
The country was converted into a group of 
principalities ruled by Princes of the same 
blood, of which the Principality of Kief was 
chief, and its ruler Grand Prince. Kief, the 
" Mother of Cities," was the heart of Rus- 
sia, and its Prince, the oldest of the descend- 
ants of Rurik, had a recognized supremacy 
over the others; who must, however, also be- 
long to this royal line. No prince could rule 
anywhere who was not a descendant of Rurik ; 
Kief, the greatest prize of all, going to the 
oldest; and when a Grand Prince died, his son 
was not his rightful heir, but his uncle, or 
brother, or cousin, or whoever among the 
Princes had the right by seniority. This was 
a survival of the patriarchal system of the 
Slavs, showing how the Norse rulers had 
adapted themselves to the native customs as 
before stated. 

34 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 35 

So while in thus breaking up the land into 
small jealous and rival states independent of 
each other — with only a nominal headship at 
Kief — ^while in this there was a movement to- 
ward chaos, there were after all some bonds of 
unity which could not be severed: A unity 
of race and language; a unity of historical de- 
velopment; a unity in religion; and the politi- 
cal unity created by the fact that all the 
thrones were filled by members of the sam^ 
family, any one of whom might become Grand 
Prince if enough of the intervening members 
could — by natural or other means — be dis- 
posed of. This was a standing invitation for 
assassination and anarchy, and one which was 
not neglected. 

Immediately upon the death of Vladimir 
there commenced a carnival of fraternal mur- 
ders, which ended by leaving Yaroslaf to 
whom had been assigned the Principality of 
Novgorod, upon the throne at Kief. 

The '' Mother of Russian Cities " began to 
show the effect of Greek influences. The 
Greek clergy had brought something besides 
Oriental Christianity into the land of barbari- 
ans. They brought a desire for better living. 
Learning began to be prized; schools were 



3^ EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

created. Music and architecture, hitherto ab- 
solutely unknown, were introduced. Kief 
grew splendid, and with its four hundred 
churches and its gilded cupolas lighted by the 
sun, was striving to be like Constantinople. 
Not alone the Sacred Books of Byzantine lit- 
erature, but works upon philosophy and sci- 
ence, and even romance, were translated into 
the Slavonic language. Russia was no longer 
the simple, untutored barbarian, guided by 
unbridled impulses. She was taking her first 
lesson in civilization. She was beginning to 
be wise; learning new accomplishments, and, 
alas! — to be systematically and judicially 
cruel ! 

Nothing could have been more repugnant 
or foreign to the free Slav barbarian than the 
penal code which was modeled by Yaroslaf 
upon the one at Byzantium. Corporal pun- 
ishment was unknown to the Slav, and was 
abhorrent to his instincts. This seems a 
strange statement to make regarding the land 
of the knout I But it is true. And imprison- 
ment, convict labor, flogging, torture, mutila- 
tion, and even the death penalty, came into 
this land by the way of Constantinople. 

At the same time there mingled with this 



E VOL UTION OF AN EMPIRE. 37 

another stream from Scandinavia, another 
judicial code which sanctioned private re- 
venge, the pursuit of an assassin by all the 
relatives of the dead; also the ordeal by red- 
hot iron and boiling water. But to the native 
Slav race, corporal punishment, with its hu- 
miliations and its refinements of cruelty, was 
unknown until brought to it by stronger and 
wiser people from afar. 

When we say that Russia was putting on a 
garment of civilization, let no one suppose we 
mean the people of Russia. It was the Princes, 
and their military and civil households; it was 
official Russia that was doing this. The peo- 
ple were still sowing and reaping, and sharing 
the fruit of their toil in common, unconscious 
as the cattle in their fields that a revolution 
was taking place, ready to be driven hither 
and thither, coerced by a power which they 
did not comprehend, their horizon bounded 
by the needs of the day and hour. 

The elements constituting Russian society 
were the same in all the principalities. There 
was first the Prince. Then his official family, 
a band of warriors called the Drujina. This 
Drujina was the germ of the future state. Its 
members were the faithful servants of the 



3^ EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

Prince, his guard and his counselors. He 
could constitute them a court of justice, or 
could make them governors of fortresses 
(posadniki) or lieutenants in the larger towns. 
The Prince and his Drujina were like a fam- 
ily of soldiers, bound together by a close tie. 
The body was divided into three orders of 
rank: first, the simple guards; second, those 
corresponding to the French barons; and, 
third, the Boyars, the most illustrious of all, 
second only to the Prince. The Drujina was 
therefore the germ of aristocratic Russia, next 
below it coming the great body of the people, 
the citizens and traders, then the peasant, and 
last of all the slave. 

Yaroslaf, the " legislator," known as the 
Charlemagne of Russia, died in the year 1054. 
The Eastern and Western Empires, long di- 
vided in sentiment, were that same year sepa- 
rated in fact, when Pope Leo VI. excom- 
municated the whole body of the Church in 
the East. 

With the death of Yaroslaf the first and 
heroic period in Russia closes. Sagas and 
legendary poems have preserved for us its 
grim outlines and its heroes, of whom Vladi- 
mir, the " Beautiful Sun of Kief," is chief. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 39 

Thus far there has been a unity in the thread 
of Russian history — but now came chaos. 
Who can relate the story of two centuries in 
which there have been 83 civil wars — 18 for- 
eign campaigns against one country alone, not 
to speak of the others — 46 barbaric invasions, 
and in which 293 Princes are said to have 
disputed the throne of Kief and other do- 
m.ains! We repeat: Who could tell this story 
of chaos; and who, after it is told, would read 
it? 

It was a vast upheaval, a process in which 
the eternal purposes were '' writ large " — 
too large to be read at the time. It was 
not intended that only the fertile Black Lands 
along the Dnieper, near to the civilizing cen- 
ter at Constantinople, should absorb the life 
currents. All of Russia was to be vitalized; 
the bleak North as well as the South; the zone 
of the forests as well as the fertile steppes. 
The instruments appointed to accomplish this 
great work were — the disorder consequent 
upon the reapportionment of the territory at 
the death of each sovereign — the fierce rival- 
ries of ambitious Princes — and the barbaric 
encroachments to which the prevailing an- 
archy made the South the prey. 



40 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

By the twelfth century the civil war had be- 
come distinctly a war between a new Russia 
of the forests and the old Russia of the fertile 
steppes. The cause of the North had a pow- 
erful leader in Andrew Bogoliubski. Andrew 
was the grandson of Monomakh and the son 
of Yuri (or George) Dolgoruki — both of 
whom were Grand Princes of extraordinary 
abiHties and commanding qualities. In 1169 
Andrew, who was then Prince of Suzdal, came 
with an immense army of followers; he 
marched against Kief. The '' Mother of Rus- 
sian Cities " was taken by assault, sacked and 
pillaged, and the Grand Principality ceased to 
exist. Russia was preparing to revolve 
around a new center in the Northeast; and 
with the new Grand Principality of Suzdal, 
far removed from Byzantine and Western 
civilizations, it looked like a return toward bar- 
barism, but was in fact the circuitous road to 
progress. The life of the nation needed to be 
drawn to its extremities, and the ambitious 
Andrew, who assumed the title and au- 
thority of Grand Prince, had established a line 
which was destined to lead to the Czars of fu- 
ture Russia, 



CHAPTER VI. 

The Principality of Novgorod had from a 
remote antiquity been the poHtical center of 
Northern, as was Kief of Southern Russia. It 
was the Novgorodians who invited the Norse 
Princes to come and rule the land; and it was 
the Novgorodians who were their least sub- 
missive subjects. When one of the Grand 
Princes proposed to send his son, whom they 
did not want, to be their Prince, they replied: 
" Send him here if he has a spare head." It 
was a fearless, proud republic, as patriotic and 
as quarrelsome as Florence, which it some- 
what resembled. Their Prince was in reality 
a figurehead. He was considered essential to 
the dignity of the state, but his fortunes were 
in the hands of two political parties, of which 
he represented the party in the ascendant. 
Novgorod was a commercial city — its life was 
in its trade with the Orient and the Greek 
Empire, and like the Italian cities, its politics 
were swayed by economic interests. Those 

41 



42 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

in trade with the East through the Volga de- 
sired a Prince from one of the great families 
about that Oriental artery in the Southeast; 
while those whose fortunes depended upon 
the Greeks preferred one from Kief or the 
principalities on the Dnieper. When one 
party fell, the Prince fell with it, and as the 
formula expressed it, they then '' made him a 
reverence, and showed him the way out of 
Novgorod " — or else held him captive until 
his successor arrived. 

Princes might come, and Princes might go, 
but an irrepressible spirit of freedom " went 
on forever"; the reigns all too short and 
troubled to disturb the ancient liberties and 
customs of the repubHc. No Grand Prince 
was ever powerful enough to impose upon 
them a Prince they did not want, and no 
Prince strong enough to oppose the will of 
the people; every act of his requiring the sanc- 
tion of their posadnik, a high official — and 
every decision subject to reversal by the 
Vetche, the popular assembly. The VetcM 
was, in fact, the real sovereign of the proud 
republic which styled itself, " My Lord Nov- 
gorod the Great." Such was the remarkable 
state which played an important, and certainly 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 43 

the most picturesque, part in the history of 
Russia. 

The first thought of the new Grand Prince 
at Suzdal was to prevent the possible rivalry 
of this arrogant principality in the North, by 
conquering it and breaking its spirit. He 
was also resolved to break thoroughly with 
the past, to destroy the system of Appanages, 
and had conceived the idea of the modem un- 
divided state. He removed his capital from 
the old town of Suzdal, which had its Vetche 
or popular assembly, to Vladimir, which had 
had none of these things, assigning as his rea- 
son, not that he intended to be sole master 
and free from all ancient trammels — but that 
the Mother of God had come to him in a 
dream and commanded him so to do! But 
an end came to all his dreams and ambitions. 
He was assassinated in 1174 by his own bo- 
yars, who were exasperated by his subversive 
policy and his proposed reforms. 

With the setting of the currents of Russian 
national life toward the North, there was 
awakened in Europe a vague sense of danger. 
Not far from Novgorod, on and about the 
shores of the Baltic, were various tributary 
Slav tribes, mingled with pagan Finns. This 



44 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

was the only point of actual contact, the only 
point without natural protection between 
Russia and Europe, and it must be guarded. 
German merchants, hand in hand with Latin 
missionaries, invaded a strip of disputed ter- 
ritory, and, under the cloak of Christianity, 
commenced a — conquest, A Latin Church be- 
came also a fortress; and the fortress soon ex- 
panded into a German town, and these crept 
every year farther and farther into the East. 
In order to quell the resistance of native Finns 
and Slavs, there was created, and authorized 
by the Pope, an order of knighthood, called 
the " Sword-Bearers," with the double pur- 
pose of driving back the Slavonic tide which 
threatened Germany and at the same time 
Christianizing it. These were the " Livonian 
Knights," who came from Saxony and West- 
phalia, armed cap-a-pie, with red crosses em- 
broidered upon the shoulder of their white 
mantles. Then another order was created 
(1225), the '' Teutonic Order," wearing black 
crosses on their shoulders, which, after frater- 
nizing with the Livonian Knights, was going 
to absorb them — together with some other 
things — into their own more powerful organi- 
zation. Russia had no armed warriors to 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 45 

meet these steel-clad Germans and Livonians. 
She had no orders of chivalry, had taken no 
part in the Crusades, the far-off echoes of 
which had fallen upon unheeding ears. The 
Russians could defend with desperate courage 
their own flimsy fortifications of wood, earth, 
and loose stones; but they could not pull down 
with ropes the solid German fortresses of 
stone and cement, and their spears were in- 
effectual upon the shining armor. Their con- 
quest was inevitable; the conquered territory 
being divided between the knights and the 
Latin Church. So Konigsberg and many 
other Russian towns were captured and then 
Teutonized, by joining them to the cities of 
Liibeck, Bremen, Hamburg, etc., in the 
'' Hanseatic League." 

This conquest was of less future importance 
to Russia than to Western Europe. It con- 
tained the germ of much history. The terri- 
tory thus wrested from Russia became the 
German state of Prussia; and a future master 
of the Teutonic order, a Hohenzollern, was in 
later years its first King; and this was the be- 
ginning of the great German Empire which 
confronts the Empire of the Czar to-day. 

So the conquest by the German Orders was 



46 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

added to the other woes by which Russia was 
rent and torn after the death of her Grand 
Prince at Suzdal. To us it all seems like an 
unmeaning panorama of chaos and disorder. 
But to them it was only the vicissitudes natu- 
rally occurring in the life of a great nation. 
They were proud of their nationality, which 
had existed nearly as long as from Columbus 
to our own day. They gloried in their splen- 
did background of great deeds and their long 
line of heroes reaching back to Rurik. Their 
Princes were proud and powerful — their fol- 
lowers (the Drujiniki) — noble and fearless — 
who could stand before them? They would 
have exchanged their glories for those of no 
nation upon the earth, except perhaps that 
waning empire of the Caesars at Constanti- 
nople! 

Such was the sentiment of Russian nation- 
ality at the time when its overwhelming 
humiliation suddenly came, a degrading sub- 
jection to Asiatic Mongols, which lasted 250 
years. 

In the year 1224 there appeared in the 
Southeast a strange host who claimed the 
land of the Polovtsui, a Tatar clan which had 
been for centuries encamped about the Sea of 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 47 

Azof. The Russian chronicler naively says: 
** There came upon us for our sins unknown 
nations. God alone knew who they were, or 
where they came from — God, and perhaps 
wise men, learned in books " — which it is evi- 
dent the chronicler was not! The invaders 
were Mongols — that branch of the human 
family from which had come the Tatars and 
the Huns, already familiar to Russia. But 
these Mongols were the vanguard of a vast 
army which had streamed like a torrent 
through the heart of Asia, conquering as it 
came; gathering one after another the Asiatic 
kingdoms into an empire ruled by Genghis 
Khan, a sovereign who in forty years had 
made himself master of China and the greater 
part of Asia — saying: " As there is only one 
Sun in Heaven, so there should be only one 
Emperor on the Earth "; and when he died, 
in 1227, he left*' the largest empire that had 
ever existed, and one which he was preparing 
to extend into Western Europe. 

It was the court of this great sovereign 
which, in 1275, was visited by the Venetian 
traveler Marco Polo. This was the far-off 
Cathay, descriptions of which fired the im- 
agination of Europe, and awoke a consuming 



48 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 

desire to get access to its fabulous riches, and 
which two centuries later filled the mind of 
Columbus with dreams of reaching that land 
of wonders by way of the West. 

The Polovtsui appealed to the nearest prin- 
cipalities for help, offering to adopt their re- 
ligion and to become their subjects, in jeturn 
for aid. When several Princes came with 
their armies to the rescue, the Mongols sent 
messengers saying: ''We have no quarrel with 
you; we have come to destroy the accursed 
Polovtsui." The Princes repUed by promptly 
putting the ambassadors all to death. This 
sealed the fate of Russia. There could be no 
compromise after that. Upon that first bat- 
tlefield, on the steppes near the sea of Azof, 
there were left six Princes, seventy chief ho- 
yars, and all but one-tenth of the Russian 
army. 

After this thunderbolt had fallen an omi- 
nous quiet reigned for thirteen years. Noth- 
ing more was heard of the Mongols — but a 
comet blazing in the sky awoke vague fears. 
Suddenly an army of five hundred thousand 
Asiatics returned, led by Batui, nephew of the 
Great Khan of Khans. 

It was the defective political structure of 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 49 

Russia, its division into principalities, which 
made it an easy prey. The Mongols, mov- 
ing as one man, took one principality at a 
time, its nobles and citizens alone bearing 
arms, the peasants, by far the greater part, be- 
ing utterly defenseless. After wrecking and 
devastating that, they passed on to the next, 
which, however desperately defended, met the 
same fate. The Grand Principality was a 
ruin; its fourteen towns were burned, and 
when, in the absence of its Grand Prince, Vla- 
dimir the capital city fell, the Princesses and 
all the families of the nobles took refuge in 
the cathedral and perished in the general con- 
flagration (1238). Two years later Kief also 
fell, with its white walls and towers embel- 
lished by Byzantine art, its cupolas of gold 
and silver. All was laid in the dust, and only 
a few fragments in museums now remain to 
tell of its glory. The annalist describes the 
bellowings of the buffaloes, the cries of the 
camels, the neighing of the horses, and bowl- 
ings of the Tatars while the ancient and beau- 
tiful city was being laid low. 

Before 1240 the work was complete. 
There was a Mongol empire where had been 
a Russian. Then the tide began to set toward 



5© EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

Western Europe. Isolated from the other 
European states by her reHgion, Russia had 
suffered alone. No Europe sprang to her de- 
fense as to the defense of Spain from the Sara- 
cens. Not until Poland and Hungary were 
threatened and invaded did the Western 
Kingdoms give any sign of interest. Then 
the Pope, in alarm, appealed to the Christian 
states. Frederick II. of Germany responded, 
and Louis IX. of France (Saint-Louis) pre- 
pared to lead a crusade. But the storm had 
spent its fury upon the Slavonic people, and 
was content to pause upon those plains which 
to the Asiatic seemed not unlike his own 
home. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Amid the wreck of principalities there was 
one state remaining erect. Novgorod was 
defended by its remoteness and its uninviting 
climate. The Mongols had not thought it 
worth while to attempt the reduction of the 
warlike state, so the stalwart Republic stood 
alone amid the general ruin. All the rest 
were under the Tatar yoke. Of Princes there 
were none. All had either been slaughtered 
or fled. Proud boyars saw their wives and 
daughters the slaves of barbarians. Deli- 
cate women who had always lived in luxury 
were grinding corn and preparing coarse food 
for their terrible masters. 

After the conquest was completed the 
Mongol sovereign exacted only three things 
from the prostrate state — homage, tribute, 
and a military contingent when required. 
They might retain their land and their cus- 
toms, might worship any god in any way; 
their Princes might dispute for the thrones as 
before; but no Prince — not the Grand Prince 

SI 



52 EVOLUTIOM OF AN EMPIRE. 

himself — could ascend a throne until he had 
permission from the Great Khan, to whom 
also every dispute between royal claimants 
must be deferred. Then when finally the 
messenger came from the sovereign with the 
yarlik, or royal sanction, the Prince must lis- 
ten kneeling, with his head in the dust. And 
if then he was invited (?) to the Mongol court 
to pay homage, he must go, even though it 
required (as Marco Polo tells us) four years 
to make the journey across the plains and the 
mountains and rivers and the Great Desert of 
Gobi! 

When Yaroslaf, of the family of Dolgoruki, 
was at last Grand Prince of Suzdal he was m- 
vited to pay this visit. After reaching there, 
and after all the degrading ceremonies to 
which he was subjected — kissing the stirrup 
of his Suzerain, and licking up the drops 
which fell from his cup as he drank — then this 
Prince of the family of Rurik perished from 
exhaustion in the Desert of Gobi on his return 
journey. But this was not all. The yoke 
was a heavy as well as a degrading one. Each 
Prince with his Dnijina must be always ready 
to lead an army in defense of the Mongol 
cause if required; and, last of all, the poll-tax 



EVOLUTION OF AN- EMPIRE. 53 

bore with intolerable weight upon everyone, 
rich or poor, excepting only the ecclesiastics 
and the property of the Greek Church, which 
with a singular clemency they exempted. 

What sort of a despotism was it, and what 
sort of a being, that could wield such a power 
from such a distance! that, across a continent 
it took four years to traverse, could compel 
such obedience; could by a word or a nod 
bring proud Princes with rage and rebellion 
in their hearts to his court — not to be hon- 
ored and enriched, but degraded and insulted; 
then in shame to turn back with their ho- 
yars and retinues, — if indeed they were permit- 
ted to go back at all, — one-half of whom 
would perish from exhaustion by the way. 
What was the secret of such a power? Even 
with all the modern appliances for conveying 
the will of a sovereign to-day, with railroads 
to carry his messengers and telegraph wires 
to convey his will, would it be conceivable to 
exert such an authority? 

And — listen to the language of a proud 
Russian Prince at the Court of the Great 
Khan: " Lord — all-powerful Tsar, if I have 
done aught against you, I come hither to re- 
ceive Hfe or death. I am ready for either. 



54 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 

Do with me as God inspires you.'* Or still 
another: " My Lord and master, by thy mercy 
hold I my principality — with no title but thy 
protection and investiture — thy yarlik; while 
my uncle claims it not by your favor but by 
right! " It was such pleading as this that 
succeeded; so it is easy to see how Princes at 
last vied with each other in being abject. In 
this particular case the presumptuous uncle 
was ordered to lead his victorious nephew's 
horse by the bridle, on his way to his corona- 
tion at Moscow. So the path to success 
was through the dust, and it was the wily 
Princes of Moscow that most patiently 
traveled that road with important results to 
Russia. 

Novgorod, as we have said, had alone es- 
caped from these degradations. Her Prince 
Alexander was son of Yaroslaf, the Grand 
Prince who perished in the desert on his way 
home. At the time of the invasion Alexan- 
der was leading an army against the Swedes 
and the Livonian Knights in defense of his 
Baltic provinces. It was Latin Christianity 
versus Greek, and by a great victory upon the 
banks of the Neva he earned undying fame 
and the surname of Nevski. Alexander Nevski 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 55 

is remembered as the hero of the Neva and of 
the North; yet even he was finally compelled 
to grovel at the feet of the barbarians. Novgo- 
rod alone had stood erect, had paid no tribute 
and offered no homage to the Khan. At last, 
when its destruction was at hand, thirty-six 
years after the invasion, Nevski had the hero- 
ism to submit to the inevitable. He advised 
a surrender. It needed a soul of iron to brave 
the indignation of the republic. " He offers 
us servitude! " they cried. The Posadnik who 
conveyed the counsel to the Vetche was mur- 
dered on the spot. But Alexander persisted, 
and he prevailed. His own son refused to 
share his father's disgrace, and left the state. 
Again and again the people withdrew the 
consent they had given. Better might Nov- 
gorod perish! But finally, when Alexander 
Nevski declared that he would go, that he 
would leave them to their fate, they yielded, 
and the Mongols came into a silent city, pass- 
ing from house to house making lists of the 
inhabitants who must pay tribute. 

Then the unhappy Prince went to prostrate 
himself before the Khan at Sarai. But his 
heart had broken with his spirit. He had 
saved his state, but the task had been too 



56 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

heavy for him. He died from exhaustion on 
his journey home (1260). 

On account of internal convulsions in the 
Great Tatar Empire, now united by Kublai- 
Khan, the fourth in succession from Genghis- 
Khan, the Golden-Horde had separated from 
the parent state, and its Khan was absolute 
ruler of Russia. So from this time the cere- 
mony of investiture was performed at Sarai; 
and the humiHating pilgrimages of the 
Princes were made to that city. 

The religion of the Mongols at the time of 
the invasion was a paganism founded upon 
sorcery and magic; but they soon thereafter 
adopted Islamism, and became ardent follow- 
ers of the Prophet (1272). Although they 
never attempted to Tatarize Russia, 250 years 
of occupation could not fail to leave indelible 
traces upon a civilization which was even 
more than before Orientalized. The dress of 
the upper classes became more Eastern — the 
flowing caftan replaced the tunic, the blood 
of the races mingled to some extent; even the 
Princes and hoyars contracting marriages 
with Mongol women, so that in some of the 
future sovereigns the blood of the Tatar was 
to be mingled with that of Rurik. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 57 

A weaker nation would have been crushed 
and disheartened by such calamities as have 
been described. But Russia was not weak. 
She had a tremendous store of vigor for good 
or for evil. Life had always been a terrible 
conflict, with nature and with man, and when 
there had been no other barbarians to fight, 
they had fought each other. Every muscle 
and every sinew had always been in the high- 
est state of activity, and was toughened and 
strong, with an inextinguishable vitality. 
Such nations do not waste time in sentimental 
regrets. Their wounds, like those of animals, 
heal quickly, and they are urged on by a sort 
of instinct to wear out the chains they cannot 
break. By the time Novgorod came under 
the Tatar yoke the entire state had adjusted 
itself to its condition of servitude. Its inter- 
nal economy was re-established, the peasants, 
in their Mirs or communes, sowed and reaped, 
and the people bought and sold, only a Httle 
more patient and submissive than before. 
The burden had grown heavier, but it must 
be borne and the tribute paid. The Princes, 
with wits sharpened by conflict, fought as they 
always had, with uncles, cousins, and brothers 
for the thrones; and then governed with a se- 



58 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

verity as nearly as possible like the one im- 
posed upon themselves by their own master — 
the Great Khan. 

The g-erm of future Russia was there; a 
strong, patient, toiling people firmly held by 
a despotic power which they did not compre- 
hend, and uncomplainingly and as a matter of 
course giving nearly one-half of the fruit of 
their toil for the privilege of living in their 
own land! When her sovereigns had Tatar 
blood in their veins and Tatar ideals in their 
hearts, Russia was on the road to absolutism. 
All things were tending toward a centralized 
unity of an iron and inexorable type — a type 
entirely foreign to the natural free instincts of 
the Slavonic people themselves. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

The tumultuous forces in Russia, never at 
rest, were preparing to revolve about a new 
center. Whether this would be in the East 
or West was long in doubt, and only decided 
after a prolonged struggle. Western Russia 
grouped itself about the state of the Lithuan- 
ians on the Baltic, and Eastern Russia about 
that of Muscovy. 

The Lithuanians had never been Christian- 
ized; they still adored Rerun and their pagan 
deities; and the only bond uniting them 
with Russia was the tribute they had for 
years reluctantly paid. They were ripe 
for rebellion; and when after long years 
of conflict with the Livonian and Teu- 
tonic Orders, Latin Christianity obtained 
some foothold in their land, they began 
to gravitate toward Catholic Poland in- 
stead of Greek Russia; and when a marriage 
was suggested which should unite Poland and 
Lithuania under their Prince lagello, who 
should reign over both at Cracow, and at the 

59 



6o EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

same time g"ive them their own Grand Prince, 
they consented. The forces instigating this 
movement had their source at Rome, where 
the Pope was unceasingly striving, through 
Germany and Poland, to carry the Latin cross 
into Russia. Again and again had the Greek 
Church repulsed the offers of reconciliation 
and union made by Rom.e. So, much was 
hoped from the proselyting of the German 
Orders, and of Catholic Poland, and from the 
union effected by the marriage of the Lithu- 
anian Prince lagello with the Polish Queen 
Hedwig. 

The threads composing this network of 
policies in the West were altogether ecclesias- 
tical, until Lithuania began to feel strong 
enough to wash off her Christian baptism and 
to indulge in ambitious designs of her own: 
to struggle away from Poland, and to. com- 
mence an independent and aggressive move- 
ment against Russia. 

There was an immense vigor in this move- 
ment. The power in the Wect, sometimes 
Catholic and at heart always pagan, absorbed 
first towns and cities and then principalities. 
It began to be a Lithuanian conquest, and 
overshadowed even Mongol oppression. The 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 6r 

Mongol wanted tribute; while Lithuania 
wanted Russia! But one of the gravest dan- 
gers brought by this war between the East 
and the West was the standing opportunity it 
offered to conspirators. An army of disaf- 
fected uncles and nephews and brothers, with 
their followers, could always find a refuge, and 
were always plotting and intriguing and 
negotiating with Lithuania and Poland, ready 
even to compromise their faith, if only they 
might ruin the existing powers. 

Such, in brief, was the great conflict be- 
tween the East and West, during which 
Moscow came into being as the supreme 
head, the living center and germ of Russian 
autocracy. 

It seems to have been the extraordinary 
vitality of one family which twice changed the 
currents of national life: first drawing them 
from Kief to Suzdal, then from Suzdal toward 
Moscow, and there establishing a center of 
growth which has expanded into Russia 
as it exists to-day. This was the family of 
Dolgoruki. Monomakh and his son George 
Dolgoruki, the last Grand Prince of Kief, 
were both men of commanding character 
and abilities; and it will be remembered 



62 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

that it was Andrew Bogoliubski, the son of 
George (or Yuri), who effected the revolu- 
tion which transferred the Grand PrincipaHty 
from Kief to Suzdal in the bleak North. 
Alexander Nevski, the hero of the Neva and 
of Novgorod, was the descendant of this An- 
drew (of Suzdal), and it was the son of Nevski 
who was the first Prince of Moscow and who 
there established a line of Princes which has 
come unbroken down to Nicholas 11. Con- 
trary to all the traditions of their state this 
dominating family was going to establish a 
dynasty, and again to remove the national life 
to a new center, in a Grand Principality 
toward which all of Russia was gradually but 
inevitably to gravitate until it became Musco- 
vite. 

The city which was to exert such an influ- 
ence upon Russia was founded in 1147 by 
George (or Yuri) Dolgoruki, the last Grand 
Prince of Kief. The story is that upon arriv- 
ing at once at the domain of a hoyar named 
Kutchko, he caused him for some offense to 
be put to death; then, as he looked out upon 
the river Moskwa from the height where now 
stands the Kremlin, so pleased was he with the 
outlook that he then and there planted the 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 63 

nucleus of a town. Whether the death of the 
hoyar or the purpose of appropriating the 
domain came first, is not stated; but upon the 
soil freshly sprinkled with human blood arose 
Moscow. 

The town was of so little importance that 
its destruction by the Tatars in 1238 was un- 
observed. In 1260, when Alexander Nevski 
died, Moscow, with a few villages, was given 
as a small appanage or portion to his son 
Daniel. Nevski, it must be remembered, was 
a direct descendant of Monomakh, and of 
George Dolgoruki, the founder of Moscow. 
So the first Prince of Moscow was of this 
illustrious line, a line which has remained 
unbroken until the present time. 

When Daniel commenced to reign over 
what was probably the most obscure and in- 
significant principality in all Russia, it was sur- 
rounded by old and powerful states, in 
perpetual struggle with each other. The 
Lithuanian conquest was pressing in from the 
West and assuming large proportions; while 
embracing the whole agitated surface was the 
odious enslavement to the Mongols and their 
oft-recurring invasions to enforce their inso- 
lent demands. 



64 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

The building of the Russian Empire was not 
a dainty task! It was not to be performed by 
delicate instruments and gentle hands. It 
needed brutal measures and unpitying hearts. 
Nor could brute force and cruelty do it alone; 
it required the subtler forces of mind — cold, 
calculating policies, patience, and craft of a 
subtle sort. The Princes of Russia had long 
been observant pupils, first at Constantinople, 
and later at the feet of the Khans. They 
could meet cruelty with cruelty, cunning with 
cunning. But it was the Princes of Moscow 
who proved themselves masters in these Ori- 
ental arts. Their cunning was not of the 
vulgar sort which works for ends that are 
near; it was the cunning which could wait, 
could patiently cringe and feign loyalty and 
devotion, with the steady purpose of tearing 
in pieces. Added to this, they had the intel- 
ligence to divine the secret of power. Certain 
ends they kept steadily in view. The old law 
of succession to eldest collateral heir they set 
aside from the outset; the principality being 
invariably divided among the sons of the de- 
ceased Prince. Then they gradually estab- 
lished the habit of giving to the eldest son 
Moscow, and only insignificant portions to the 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 65 

rest. So primogeniture lay at the root of the 
policy of the new state — and they had created 
a dynasty. 

Then their invariable method was by cun- 
ning arts to embroil neighboring Princes in 
quarrels, and so to ingratiate themselves with 
their master the Khan, that when they ap- 
peared before him at Sarai — as they must — 
for his decision, while one unfortunate Prince 
(unless perchance he was beheaded and 
did not come away at all) came away without 
his throne, the faithful Prince of Moscow re- 
turned with a new state added to his territory 
and a new title to his name! Was he not 
always ready, not only to obey himself, but to 
enforce the obedience of others? Did he not 
stand ready to march against Novgorod, or any 
proud, refractory state which failed in tribute 
or homage to his master the Khan? No 
gloomier, no darker chapter is written in his- 
tory than that which records the transition of 
Russia into Muscovy. It was rooted in a 
tragedy, it was nourished by human blood at 
every step of its growth. It was by base ser- 
vility to the Khans, by perfidy to their peers, 
by treachery and by prudent but pitiless 
policy, that Moscow rose from obscurity to 



66 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

the supreme headship — and the name of Mus- 
covy was attained. 

There was a Hne of eight Muscovite Princes 
from Daniel (1260) to the death of VasiU 
(1462), but they moved as steadily toward one 
end as if one man had been during those two 
centuries guiding the policy of the state. The 
city of Moscow was made great. The Krem- 
lin was built (1300) — not as we see it now. It 
required many centuries to accumulate all the 
treasures within that sacred inclosure of walls, 
crowned by eighteen towers. But with each 
succeeding reign there arose new buildings, 
more and more richly adorned by jewels and 
by Byzantine art. 

Then the city was made the ecclesiastical 
center of Russia. The Metropolitan, second 
only to the Great Patriarch at Constantinople, 
was induced to remove to Moscow from Vlad- 
imir, capital of the Grand Principality. This 
was an important advance; for in the train of 
the great ecclesiastic came splendor of ritual, 
and wealth and culture and art; and a cathe- 
dral and more palaces must be added to the 
Kremlin. In 1328 the Prince of Moscow, 
being the eldest descendant of Rurik, fell heir 
by the old law of succession to the Grand 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 67 

Principality. Now the Prince of Moscow was 
also Grand Prince of Vladimir, an opportunity 
which was not neglected. He continued to 
dwell in his own capital, and the Grand Princi- 
pality was ruled from Moscow, and then the first 
act of the Grand Prince was to claim sover- 
eignty over Novgorod. The people were de- 
prived of their Vetche and their posadnik, while 
one of his own boyars represented his author- 
ity and ruled as their Prince. Then the com- 
pliant Khan bestowed upon his faithful vassal 
the triple crown of Vladimir, Moscow, and 
Novgorod, to which were soon to be added 
many others. 

The next step was to be the setting aside of 
the old Slavonic law of inheritance, and claim- 
ing the throne of the Grand Principality for 
the oldest son of the last reigning Grand 
Prince; making sure at the same time that this 
Prince belonged to the Muscovite line. This 
was not entirely accompHshed until 1431, 
when Vasili carried his dispute to the Horde 
for the Khan's decision. The other disputant, 
who was making a desperate stand for his 
rights under the old system of seniority, was 
the " presumptuous uncle " already men- 
tioned, who was, it will be remembered, com- 



6S EVOLUTION OF AM EMPIRE. 

manded to lead by the bridle the horse of his 
triumphant Muscovite nephew. The sons of 
the disappointed uncle, however, conspired 
with success even after that; and finally, in a 
rage, Vasili ordered that the eyes of one of his 
cousins be put out. But time brings its re- 
venges. Ten years later the Grand Prince, on 
an evil day, fell into the hands of the remain- 
ing cousin, — brother of his victim, — and had 
his own eyes put out. So he was thereafter 
known as '' Vasili the Blind." This wily 
Prince kept his oldest son Ivan close to him; 
and, that there might be no doubt about his 
succession, so familiarized him with his posi- 
tion and placed him so firmly in the saddle that 
it would not be easy to unseat him when his 
own death occurred. 

Many things had been happening during 
these two centuries besides the absorption of 
the Russian principalities by Moscow. The 
ambitious designs of Lithuania, in which Po- 
land and Hungary, and the German Knights 
and Latin Christianity, were all involved, had 
been checked, and the disappointed state of 
Lithuania was gravitating toward a union with 
Poland. More important still, the Empire of 
the Khan was falling into pieces. The proc- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 69 

ess had been hastened by a tremendous vic- 
tory obtained by the Grand Prince Dmitri in 
1378, on the banks of the Don. In the same 
way that Alexander Nevski obtained the 
sur-name of Nevski by the battle on the Neva, 
so Dmitri Donskoi won his upon the river 
Don. Hitherto the Tatars had been resisted, 
but not attacked. It was the first real out- 
burst against the Mongol yoke, and it shook 
the foundations of their authority. Then 
dissensions among themselves, and the strug- 
gles of numerous claimants for the throne at 
Sarai broke the Golden-Horde into five Khan- 
ates each claiming supremacy. 



CHAPTER IX. 

Something else had been taking place dur- 
ing these two centuries: something which in- 
volved the future, not alone of Russia, but of 
all Europe. In 1250, just ten years before 
Daniel established the line of Princes in Mos- 
cow, a little band of marauding Turks were 
encamped upon a plain in Asia Minor. They 
were led by an adventurer named^ Etrogruhl. 
For some service rendered to the ruler of the 
land Etrogruhl received a strip of territory 
as his reward, and when he died his son Oth- 
man displayed such ability in increasing his 
inheritance by absorbing the lands of other 
people that he became the terror of his neigh- 
bors. He had laid the foundation of the Otto- 
man empire and was the first of a line of thirty- 
five sovereigns, extending down to the present 
time. It is the descendant of Othman and of 
Etrogruhl the adventurer who sits to-day at 
Constantinople blocking the path to the East 
and defying Christendom. These Ottoman 

70 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 7^ 

Turks were going to accomplish what Russian 
Princes from the time of Rurik and Oleg had 
longed and failed to do. They were going to 
break the power of the old empire in the East 
and make the coveted city on the Bosphorus 
their own. In 1453, the successor of Othman 
was in Constantinople. 

The Pope, always hoping for a reconcilia- 
tion, and always striving for the headship of 
a united Christendom, had in 1439 made fresh 
overtures to the Greek Church. The Em- 
peror at Constantinople, three of the Patri- 
archs, and seventeen of the Metropolitans — 
including the one at Moscow — at last signed 
the Act of Union. But when the astonished 
Russians heard the prayer for the Pope, and 
saw the Latin cross upon their altars, their 
indignation knew no bounds. The Grand 
Prince Vasili so overwhelmed the Metropoli- 
tan with insults that he could not remain in 
Moscow, and the Union was abandoned. Its 
wisdom as a political measure cannot be 
doubted. If the Emperor had had the sym- 
pathy of the Pope, and the championship of 
Catholic Europe, the Turks might not have 
entered Constantinople in 1453. But they 
had not that sympathy, and the Turks did 



12 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

enter it; and no one event has ever left so last- 
ing an impress upon civilization as the over- 
throw of the old Byzantine Empire, and the 
giving to the winds, to carry whither they 
would, its hoarded treasures of ancient ideals. 
Byzantium had been the heir to Greece, and 
now Russia claimed to be heir to Byzantium; 
while the head of Russia was Moscow, and the 
head of Moscow was Ivan III., who had just 
settled himself firmly on the seat left by his 
father, '' Vasili the Blind " (1462). 

Christendom had never received such a 
blow. Where had been before a rebellious 
and alienated brother, who might in time be 
reconciled, there was now — and at the very 
Gate of Europe — the infidel Turk, the bitter- 
est and most dangerous foe to Christianity; 
bearing the same hated emblem that Charles 
Martel had driven back over the Pyrenees (in 
732), and which had enslaved the Spanish 
Peninsula for seven hundred years; but, unlike 
the Saracen, bringing barbarism instead of 
enlightenment in its train. 

The Pope, in despair and grief, turned 
toward Russia. Its Metropolitan had become 
a Patriarch now, and the headship of the 
Greek Church had passed from Constantino- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 73 

pie to Moscow. A niece of the last Greek 
Emperor, John Paleologus, had taken refuge 
in Rome; and when the Pope suggested the 
marriage of this Greek Princess Zoe with Ivan 
III., the proposition was joyfully accepted by 
him. After changing her name from Zoe to So- 
phia, and making a triumphal journey through 
Russia, this daughter of the Emperors reached 
Moscow and became the bride of Ivan III. 
Moscow had long been the ecclesiastical head 
of Russia; now she was the spiritual head of 
the Church in the East, and her ruling family 
was joined to that of the Caesars. Russia 
had certainly fallen heir to all that was left of 
the wreck of the Empire, and her future 
sovereigns might trace their lineage back to 
the Roman Caesars! 

Moscow, by its natural position, was the dis- 
tributing center of Russian products. The 
wood from the North, the corn from the fer- 
tile lands, and the food from the cattle region 
all poured into her lap, making her the com- 
mercial as well as the spiritual and political 
center. Now there flowed to that favored city 
another enriching stream. Following in the 
train of Ivan's Greek wife, were scholars, 
statesmen, diplomatists, artists. A host of 



74 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

Greek emigrants fleeing from the Turks, took 
refuge in Moscow, bringing with them books, 
manuscripts, and priceless treasures rescued 
from the ruined Empire. If this was a period 
of Renaissance for Western Europe, was it not 
rather a Naissance for Russia? What must 
have been the Russian people when her princes 
were still only barbarians? If Ivan valued 
these things, it was because they had been 
worn by Byzantium, and to him they symbol- 
ized power. There was plenty of rough work 
for him to do yet. There were Novgorod and 
her sister-republic Pskof to be wiped out, and 
Sweden and the Livonian Order on his bor- 
ders to be looked after, Bulgaria and other 
lands to be absorbed, and last and most impor- 
tant of all, the Mongol yoke to be broken. 
And while he was planning for these he had 
little time for Greek manuscripts; he was in- 
troducing the knout, ^ until then a stranger to 
his Slavonic people; he was having Princes 
and hoyars and even ecclesiastics whipped and 
tortured and mutilated; and, it is said, roasted 
alive two Polish gentlemen in an iron cage, for 
conspiracy. We hear that women fainted at 
his glance, and hoyars trembled while he 
slept; that instead of ''Ivan the Great" he 
* From the word knot. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 75 

would be known as " Ivan the Terrible," had 
not his grandson Ivan IV. so far outshone 
him. That he had his softer moods we know. 
For he loved his Greek wife, and shed tears 
copiously over his brother's death, even while 
he was appropriating all the territory which 
had belonged to him. And so great was his 
grief over the death of his only son, that he 
ordered the physicians who had attended him 
to be publicly beheaded! 

The art of healing seems to have been a 
dangerous calling at that time. A learned 
German physician, named Anthony, in whom 
Ivan placed much confidence, was sent by him 
to attend a Tatar Prince who was a visitor at 
his court. When the Prince died after taking 
a decoction of herbs prepared by the physi- 
cian, Ivan gave him up to the Tatar relatives 
of the deceased, to do with him as they liked. 
They took him down to the river Moskwa 
under the bridge, where they cut him in pieces 
like a sheep. 

Ivan III. was not a warrior Prince like his 
great progenitors at Kief. It was even sus- 
pected that he lacked personal courage. He 
rarely led his armies to battle. His greatest 
triumphs were achieved sitting in his palace 



76 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

in the Kremlin; and bis weapons were found 
in a cunning and far-reaching diplomacy. He 
swept away the system of appanages, and one 
by one effaced the privileges and the old legal 
and judicial systems in those Principalities 
which were not yet entirely absorbed. While 
maintaining an outward respect for Mongol 
authority, and while receiving its friendly 
aid in his attacks upon Novgorod and Lithua- 
nia, he was carefully laying his plans for open 
defiance. He cunningly refrained from pay- 
ing tribute and homage on the pretense that 
he could not decide which of the five was 
lawful Khan. 

In 1478 an embassy arrived at Moscow to 
collect tribute, bringing as the symbol of their 
authority an image of the Khan Akhmet. 
Ivan tore off the mask of friendship. In a fury 
he trampled the image under his feet and (it 
is said) put to death all except one whom he 
sent back with his message to the Golden 
Horde. The astonished Khan sent word that 
he would pardon him if he would come to 
Sarai and kiss his stirrup. 

At last Ivan consented to lead his own army 
to meet that of the enraged Khan. The two 
armies confronted each other on the banks of 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 77 

the Oka. Then after a pause of several 
days, suddenly both were seized with a 
panic and fled. And so in this inglorious 
fashion in 1480, after three centuries of 
oppression and insult, Russia slipped from 
under the Mongol yoke. There were many 
Mongol invasions after this. Many times did 
they unite with Lithuanians and Poles and the 
enemies of Russia; many times were they at 
the gates of Moscow, and twice did they burn 
that city — excepting the Kremlin — to the 
ground. But never again was there homage 
or tribute paid to the broken and demoralized 
Asiatic power which long lingered about the 
Crimea. There are to-day two millions of 
nomad Mongols encamped about the south- 
eastern steppes of Russia, still living in tents, 
still raising and herding their flocks, little 
changed in dress, habits, and character since 
the days of Genghis Khan. While this is writ- 
ten a famine is said to be raging among them. 
This is the last remnant of the great Mongol 
invasion. 

In 1487 Ivan marched upon Kazan. The 
city was taken after a siege of seven weeks. 
The Tsar of Kazan was a prisoner in Moscow 
and '' Prince of Bulgaria." was added to the 
titles of Ivan III. 



CHAPTER X. 

Vasili, who succeeded Ivan III. in 1505, 
continued his work on the same lines of ab- 
sorption and consoHdation by unmerciful 
means. Pskof, — the sister republic to Nov- 
gorod the Great, — which had guarded its 
liberties with the same passionate devotion, 
was obliged to submit. The bell which had 
always summoned their Vetche, and which 
symbolized their liberty, was carried away. 
Their lament is as famous as that for the 
Moorish city of Alhama, when taken by 
Ferdinand of Aragon. The poetic annalist 
says: " Alas! glorious city of Pskof — why this 
weeping and lamentation?" Pskof replies: 
" How can I but weep and lament? An eagle 
with claws like a lion has swooped down upon 
me. He has captured my beauty, my riches, 
my children. Our land is a desert! our city 
ruined. Our brothers have been carried 
away to a place where our fathers never dwelt 
— nor our grandfathers — nor our great-grand- 

78 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 79 

fathers! " In the whole tragic story of Rus- 
sia nothing is more pathetic and picturesque 
than the destruction of the two republics — 
Novgorod and Pskof. 

By 1523 the last state had yielded, and the 
absorption was complete. There was only 
one Russia; and the head of the consoli- 
dated empire called himself not '' Grand 
Prince of all the Russias," but Tsar. When 
it is remembered that Tsar is only the Sla- 
vonic form for Ccesar, it will be realized that 
the dream of the Varangian Princes had been 
in an unexpected way realized. The Tsar 
of Russia was the successor of the Caesars in 
the East. 

Vasili's method of choosing a wife was like 
that of Ahasuerus. Fifteen hundred of the 
most beautiful maidens of noble birth were as- 
sembled at Moscow. After careful scrutiny 
the number was reduced to ten, then to five — 
from these the final choice was made. His 
wife's relations formed the court of Vasili, be- 
came his companions and advisers, hoyars 
vying with each other for the privilege of 
waiting upon his table or assisting at his toilet. 
But the office of adviser was a difficult one. 
To one great lord who in his inexperience 



8o EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

ventured to offer counsel, as in the olden time 
of the Drujina, he said sharply: *' Be silent, 
rustic." While still another, more indiscreet, 
who had ventured to complain that they were 
not consulted, was ordered to his bedchamber, 
and there had his head cut off. 

The court grew in barbaric and in Greek 
splendor. As the Tsar sat upon the throne 
supported by mechanical lions which roared at 
intervals, he was guarded by young nobles with 
high caps of white fur, wearing long caftans 
of white satin and armed with silver hatchets. 
Greek scholarship was also there. A learned 
monk and friend of Savonarola was translat- 
ing Greek books and arranging for him the 
priceless volumes in his library. Vasili him- 
self was now in correspondence with Pope 
Leo X., who was using all his arts to induce 
him to make friends with Catholic Poland and 
join in the most important of all wars — a war 
upon Constantinople, of which he, Vasili, the 
spiritual and temporal heir to the Eastern 
Empire, was the natural protector. 

All this was very splendid. But things 
were moving with the momentum gained by 
his father, Ivan the Great. It was Vasili's in- 
heritance, not his reign, that was great. That 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 8 1 

inheritance he had maintained and increased. 
He had humiHated the nobility, had developed 
the movements initiated by his greater father, 
and had also shown tastes magnificent enough 
for the heir of his imperial mother, Sophia 
Paleologus. But he is overshadowed in his- 
tory by standing between the two Ivans — 
Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible. 

Leo X. was soon too much occupied with 
a new foe to think about designs upon Con- 
stantinople. A certain monk was nailing a 
protest upon the door of the Church at Wit- 
tenburg which would tax to the uttermost his 
energies. As from time to time travelers 
brought back tales of the splendor of the Mus- 
covite court, Europe was more than ever 
afraid of such neighbors. What might these 
powerful barbarians not do, if they adopted 
European methods! More stringent measures 
were enforced. They must not have access to 
the implements of civilization, and Sigismund, 
King of Poland, threatened English mer- 
chants on the Baltic with death. 

It is a singular circumstance that although, 
up to the time of Ivan the Great, Russia had 
apparently not one thing in common with the 
states of Western Europe, they were still sub- 



82 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

ject to the same great tides or tendencies and 
were moving simultaneously toward identical 
political conditions. An invisible but com- 
pelling hand had been upon every European 
state, drawing the power from many heads 
into one. In Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella 
had brought all the smaller kingdoms and the 
Moors under one united crown. In France, 
Louis XL had shattered the fabric of feudal- 
ism, and by artful alliance with the people had 
humiliated and subjugated the proud nobility. 
Henry VIII. had established absolutism in 
England, and Maximilian had done the same 
for Germany, while even the Italian republics 
were being gathered into the hands of larger 
sovereignties. From this distance in time it 
is easy to see the prevailing direction in 
which all the nations were being irresistibly 
drawn. 

The hour had struck for the tide to flow to- 
ward centralization ; and Russia, remote, cut ofif 
from all apparent connection with the West- 
ern kingdoms, was borne along upon the same 
tide with the rest, as if it was already a part 
of the same organism! There, too, the power 
was passing from the many to one: first from 
many ruling families to one family, then from 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 83 

all the individual members of that family to a 
supreme and permanent head — the Tsar. 

There were many revolutions in Russia 
from the time when the Dolgorukis turned 
the life-currents from Kief to the North ; many 
centers of volcanic energy in fearful state of 
activity, and many times when ruin threatened 
from every side. But in the midst of all this 
there was one steady process — one end being 
always aproached — a consolidation and a 
centralization of authority before which Euro- 
pean monarchies would pale! The process 
commenced with the autocratic purposes of 
Andrew Bogoliubski. And it was because his 
hoyars instinctively knew that the success of 
his policy meant their ruin that they assassi- 
nated him. 

In '' Old Russia " a close and fraternal tie 
bound the Prince and his Drujina together. 
It was one family, of which he was the adored 
head. What characterized the '' New Rus- 
sia " was a growing antagonism between the 
Grand Prince and his lords or hoyars. This 
developed into a life-and-death struggle, 
similar to that between Louis XL and his no- 
bility. His elevation meant their humiliation. 
It was a terrible clash of forces — a duel in 



^4 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

which one was the instrument of fate, and the 
other predestined to destruction. 

It was of less importance during the period 
between Andrew Bogoliubski and Ivan IV. 
that Mongols were exercising degrading tyr- 
anny and making desperate reprisals for de- 
feat — that Lithuania and Poland, and conspi- 
rators everywhere, were by arms and by di- 
plomacy and by treachery trying to ruin the 
state; all this was of less import than the fact 
that every vestige of authority was surely 
passing out of the hands of the nobility into 
those of the Tsar. The fight was a desperate 
one. It became open and avowed under Ivan 
III., still more bitter under his son VasiH II., 
and culminated at last under Ivan the Terri- 
ble, when, like an infuriated animal, he let 
loose upon them all the pent-up instincts in 
his blood. 



CHAPTER XL 

In 1533 Vasili 11. died, leaving the scepter 
to Ivan IV., an infant son three years old. 
Now the humiliated Princes and boyars were 
to have their turn. The mother of Ivan IV., 
Helena Glinski, was the only obstacle in their 
way. She speedily died, the victim of poi- 
son, and then there was no one to stem the tid^ 
of princely and oligarchic reaction against 
autocracy; and the many years of Ivan's min- 
ority would give plenty of time to re-establish 
their lost authority. The boyars took posses- 
sion of the government. Ivan wrote later: 
'' My brother and I were treated like the chil- 
dren of beggars. We were half clothed, cold, 
and hungry." The boyars in the presence of 
these children appropriated the luxuries and 
treasures in the palace and then plundered the 
people as well, exacting unmerciful fines and 
treating them like slaves. The only person 
who loved the neglected Ivan was his nurse, 
and she was torn from him; and for a courtier 

85 



S6 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

to pity the forlorn child was sufficient for his 
downfall. Ivan had a superior intelligence. 
He read much and was keenly observant of all 
that was happening. He saw himself treated 
with insolent contempt in private, but with ab- 
ject servility in public. He also observed that 
his signature was required to give force to 
everything that was done, and so discovered 
that he was the rightful master, that the real 
power was vested only in him. Suddenly, in 
1543, he sternly summoned his court to come 
into his presence, and, ordering the guards to 
seize the chief offender among his hoyars, he 
then and there had him torn to pieces by his 
hounds. This was a coup d'etat by a boy of 
thirteen! He was content with the banish- 
ment of many others, and then Ivan IV. 
peacefully commenced his reign. He seemed 
a gentle, indolent youth; very confiding in 
those he trusted; inclined to be a voluptuary, 
loving pleasure and study and everything bet- 
ter than affairs of state. In 1547 he was 
crowned Tsar of Russia, and soon thereafter 
married Anastasia of the house of Romanoff, 
whom he devotedly loved. As was the cus- 
tom, he surrounded himself with his mother's 
and his wife's relations. So the GHnskis and 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 87 

the Romanoffs were the envied famiHes in 
control of the government. His mother's 
family, the Glinskis, were especially unpopu- 
lar; and when a terrific fire destroyed nearly 
the whole of Moscow it was whispered by 
jealous hoyars that the Princess Anna Glinski 
had brought this misfortune upon them by en- 
chantments. She had taken human hearts, 
boiled them in water, and then sprinkled the 
houses where the fire started! An enraged 
populace burst into the palace of the Glinskis, 
murdering all they could find. 

Ivan, nervous and impressionable, seems to 
have been profoundly affected by all this. He 
yielded to the popular demand and appointed 
two men to administer the government, spirit- 
ual and temporal — Adashef, belonging to the 
smaller nobility, and Silvester, a priest. Be- 
lieving absolutely in their fidelity, he then con- 
cerned himself very little about affairs of state, 
and engaged in the completion of the work 
commenced by Ivan III. — a revision of the 
old code of laws established by Yaroslaf. 
These were very peaceful and very happy 
years for Russia and for himself. But Ivan 
was stricken with a fever, and while appar- 
ently in a dying condition he discovered the 



88 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

treachery of his trusted ministers. He dis- 
covered their intrigues with his enemies. 
When he heard their rejoicings that the day 
of the GHnskis and the Romanoffs was over, 
he reahzed the fate awaiting Anastasia and her 
infant son if he died. He resolved that he 
would not die. 

Banishment seems a light punishment to 
have inflicted. It was gentle treatment for 
treason at the court of Moscow. But the poi- 
son of suspicion had entered his soul, and was 
the more surely, because slowly, working a 
transformation in his character. And when 
soon thereafter Anastasia mysteriously and 
suddenly died, his whole nature seemed to be 
undergoing a change. He was passing from 
Ivan the gentle and confiding, into '' Ivan the 
Terrible." 

Ivan said later, in his own vindication: 
" When that dog Adashef betrayed me, was 
anyone put to death? Did I not show mercy? 
They say now that I am cruel and irascible; 
but to whom? I am cruel toward those that 
are cruel to me. The good! ah, I would give 
them the robe and the chain that I wear! My 
subjects would have given me over to the 
Tatars, sold me to my enemies. Think of 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 89 

the enormity of the treason! If some were 
chastised, was it not for their crimes, and are 
they not my slaves — and shall I not do what 
I will with mine own? " 

His grievances were real. His hoyars were 
desperate and determined, and even with their 
foreheads in the dust were conspiring against 
him. They were no less terrible than he 
toward their inferiors. There never could be 
anything but anarchy in Russia so long as this 
aristocracy of cruel slave-masters existed. 
Ivan (like Louis XL) was girding himself for 
the destruction of the power of his nobility, 
and, as one conspiracy after another was re- 
vealed, faster and faster flowed the torrent of 
his rage. 

In 1 571 he devoutly asked the prayers of 
the Church for 3470 of his victims, 986 of 
whom he mentioned by name; many of these 
being followed by the sinister addition: 
*' With his wife and children"; "with his 
sons"; ''with his daughters." A gentle, 
kindly Prince had been converted into a mon- 
ster of cruelty, who is called, by the historians 
of his own country, the Nero of Russia. 

He was a pious Prince, like all of the Mus- 
covite line. Not one of his subjects was more 



9° EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

faithful in religious observances than was this 
'* torch of orthodoxy " — who frequently called 
up his household in the middle of the night 
for prayers. Added to the above pious peti- 
tion for mercy to his victims, is this reference 
to Novgorod: '' Remember, Lord, the souls of 
thy servants to the number of 1505 persons — 
Novgorodians, whose names, Almighty, thou 
knowest/' 

That Republic had made its last break for 
liberty. Under the leadership of Marfa, the 
widow of a wealthy and powerful noble, it had 
thrown itself in despair into the arms of Catho- 
lic Poland. This was treason to the Tsar and 
to the Church, and its punishment was awful. 
The desperate woman who had instigated the 
act was carried in chains to Moscow, there to 
behold her two sons with the rest of the con- 
spirators beheaded. The bell which for cen- 
turies had summoned her citizens to the 
Vetche, that sacred symbol of the liberty of the 
Republic, is now in the Museum at Moscow. 
If its tongue should speak, if its clarion call 
should ring out once more, perhaps there 
might come from the shades a countless host 
of her martyred dead — " Whose names. Al- 
mighty, thou knowest." Ivan then pro- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 9 1 

ceeded to wreck the prosperity of the richest 
commercial city in his empire. Its trade was 
enormous with the East and the West. It 
had joined the Hanseatic League, and its 
wealth was largely due to the German mer- 
chants who had flocked there. With singular 
lack of wisdom, the Tsar had confiscated the 
property of these men, and now the ruin of 
the city was complete. 

While Germany, and Poland, and Sweden, 
— resolved to shut up Russia in her barbaric 
isolation, — were locking the front door on the 
Baltic and the Gulf, England had found a 
side door by which to enter. With great satis- 
faction Ivan saw English traders coming in by 
way of the White Sea, and he extended the 
rough hand of his friendship to Queen Eliza- 
beth, who made with him a commercial treaty, 
which was countersigned by Francis Bacon. 
Then, as his friendship warmed, he proposed 
that they should sign a reciprocal engagement 
to furnish each other with an asylum in the 
event of the rebellion of their subjects. 
Elizabeth declined the asylum he kindly of- 
fered her, " finding, by the grace of God, no 
dangers of the sort in her kingdom." Then 
he did her the honor to offer an alliance of a 



92 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

different kind. He proposed that she should 
send him her cousin Lady Mary Hastings to 
take the place left vacant by his eighth wife — 
to become his Tsaritsa. The proposition was 
considered, but when the English maiden 
heard about his brutalities and about his 
seven wives, so terrified was she that she re- 
fused to leave England, and the affair had to 
be abandoned. Elizabeth's rejection of his 
proposals, and also of his plan for an alliance 
offensive and defensive against Poland and 
Sweden, so infuriated Ivan that he confis- 
cated the goods of the English merchants, 
and this friendship was temporarily ruptured. 
But amicable relations were soon restored be- 
tween Elizabeth and her barbarian admirer. 
If she had heard of his awful vengeance in 
1 571, she had also heard of the massacre of 
St. Bartholomew in Paris in 1572! 

Russia had now opened diplomatic relations 
with the Western kingdoms. The foreign 
ambassadors were received with great pomp 
in a sumptuous hall hung with tapestries and 
blazing with gold and silver. The Tsar, with 
crown and scepter, sat upon his throne, sup- 
ported by the roaring lions, and carefully 
studied the new ambassador as he suavely 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 93 

asked him about his master. A poHce inspec- 
tor from that moment never lost sight of him, 
making sure that he obtained no interviews 
with the natives nor information about the 
state of the country. Although the Tsar was 
reputed to be, learned and was probably the 
most learned man in his nation, and had 
always about him a coterie of distinguished 
scholars, still there was no intellectual Hfe in 
Russia, and owing to the Oriental seclusion of 
the women there was no society. The men 
were heavily bearded, and the ideal of beauty 
with the women, as they looked furtively out 
from behind veils and curtains, was to be fat, 
with red, white, and black paint laid on like a 
mask. It must have been a dreary post for 
gay European diplomats, and in marked con- 
trast to gay, witty, gallant Poland, at that 
time thoroughly Europeanized. 

Next to the consolidation of the imperial 
authority, the event in this reign most affect- 
ing the future of Russia was the acquisition of 
Siberia. A Cossack brigand under sentence 
of death escaped with his followers into the 
land beyond the Urals, and conquered a part 
of the territory, then returned and offered it 
to Ivan (1580) in exchange for a pardon. 



94 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

The incident is the subject of a bilma, a form 
of historical poem, in which Yermak says: 

• ' I am the robber Hetman of the Don. 
And now — oh — orthodox Tsar, 
I bring you my traitorous head, 
And with it I bring the Empire of Siberia! 

And the orthodox Tsar will speak — 
He will speak — the terrible Ivan, 
Ha ! thou art Yermak, the Hetman of the Don, 
I pardon thee and thy band. 
I pardon thee for thy trusty service — 
And I give to the Cossack the glorious and gentle 
Don as an inheritance." 

The two Ivans had created a new code of 
laws, and now there was an ample prison- 
house for its transgressors! The penal code 
was frightful. An insolvent debtor was tied 
up half naked in a public place and beaten 
three hours a day for thirty or forty days, and 
then, if no one came to his rescue, with his 
wife and his children he was sold as a slave. 
But Siberia was to be the prison-house of a 
more serious class of offender for whom 
this punishment would be insufhcient. It 
was to serve as a vast penal colony for crimes 
against the state. Since the beginning of the 
nineteenth century it is said one million politi- 
cal exiles have been sent there, and they con- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 95 

tinue to go at the rate of twenty thousand a 
year; showing how useful a present was made 
by the robber Yermak to the '' Orthodox 
Tsar"! 

This reign, Hke that of Louis XL of France, 
which it much resembled, enlarged the privi- 
leges of the people in order to aid Ivan in his 
conflict with his nobility. For this purpose 
a Sohor, or States-General, was summoned by 
him, and met at long intervals thereafter until 
the time of Peter the First. 

Of the two sons left to Ivan by his wife 
Anastasia, only one now remained. In a par- 
oxysm of rage he had struck the Tsarevitch 
with his iron stafif. He did not intend to kill 
him, but the blow was mortal. Great and 
fierce was the sorrow of the Tsar when he 
found he had slain his beloved son — the one 
thing he loved upon earth, and there remained 
to inherit the fruit of his labors and his crimes 
only another child enfeebled in body and 
mind, and an infant, the son of his seventh 
wife. His death, hastened by grief, took 
place three years later, in 1584. 



CHAPTER XII. 

Occasionally there arises a man in history 
who, without distinction of birth or other ad- 
vantages, is strong enough by sheer ability to 
grasp the opportunity, vault into power, and 
then stem the tide of events. Such a man was 
Godwin, father of Harold, last Saxon King in 
England; and such a man was Boris Godunof, 
a boyar, who had so faithfully served the terri- 
ble Ivan that he leaned upon him and at last 
confided to him the supervision of his feeble 
son Feodor, when he should succeed him. 
The plans of this ambitious usurper were 
probably laid from the time of the tragic death 
of Ivan's son, the Tsarevitch. He brought 
about the marriage of his beautiful sister Irene 
with Feodor, and from the hour of Ivan's 
death was virtual ruler. Dmitri, the infant 
son of the late Tsar, aged five years, was 
prudently placed at a distance — and soon 
thereafter mysteriously died (1591). There 
can be no doubt that the unexplained tragedy 

96 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 97 

of this child's death was perfectly understood 
by Boris; and when Feodor also died, seven 
years later (1598), there was not one of the old 
Muscovite line to succeed to the throne. But 
so wise had been the administration of affairs 
by the astute Regent that a change was 
dreaded. A council offered him the crown, 
which he feigned a reluctance to accept, pre- 
ferring that the invitation should come from 
a source which would admit of no question 
as to his rights in the future. Accordingly, 
the States-General or Sobor was convened, 
and Boris Godunof was chosen by acclama- 
tion. 

The work of three reigns was undone. A 
boyar was Tsar of Russia — and a boyar not 
in the line of Rurik and with Tatar blood 
in his veins! But this bold and unscrupu- 
lous man had performed a service to the 
state. The work of the Muscovite Princes 
was finished, and the extinction of the line was 
the next necessary event in the path of 
progress. 

Boris had large arid comprehensive views 
and proceeded upon new lines of policy to re- 
construct the state. He saw that Russia must 
be Europeanized, and he also saw that at least 



98 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

one radical change in her internal policy might 
be used to insure his popularity with the 
Princes and nobles. The Russian peasantry 
was an enormous force which was not utilized 
to its fullest extent. It included almost the en- 
tire rural population of Russia. The peasant 
was legally a freeman. He lived unchanged 
under the old Slavonic patriarchal system of 
Mirs, or communes, and Volosts. These were 
the largest political organizations of which he 
had personal cognizance. He knew nothing 
about Muscovite consolidation, nor oligarchy, 
nor autocracy. No crumbs from the modern 
banquet had fallen into his lap. With a thin 
veneer of orthodoxy over their paganism 
and superstition the people listened in childish 
wonder to the same old tales — they lived their 
old primitive life of toil under the same system 
of simple fair-dealing and justice. If their 
commune owned the land it tilled, they all 
shared the benefit of the harvests, paid their 
tax to the state, and all was well. If not, it 
swarmed like a community of bees to some 
wealthy neighbor's estate and sold its labor to 
him, and then if he proved too hard a task- 
master — even for a patient Russian peasant — 
they might swarm again and work for another. 



£: VOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 99 

The tie binding them to special localities was 
only the very slightest. There were no moun- 
tains to love, one part of the monotonous pla- 
teau was about like another; and as for their 
homes, their wooden huts were burned down 
so often there were no memories attached to 
them. 

The result of this was that the peasantry — 
that immense force upon which the state at 
last depended — was not stable and permanent, 
but fluid. At the slightest invitation of better 
wages, or better soil or conditions, whole 
communities might desert a locality — would 
gather up their goods and walk ofif. Boris, 
while Regent, conceived the idea of correcting 
this evil, in a way which would at the same 
time make him a very popular ruler with the 
class whose support he most needed, the 
Princes and the landowners. He would 
chain the peasant to the soil. A decree was 
issued that henceforth the peasant must not 
go from one estate to another. He belonged 
to the land he was tilling, as the trees that 
grew on it belonged to it, and the master of 
that land was his master for evermore! 

Such, in brief outline, was the system of 
serfdom which prevailed until 1861. It was 



loo EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

in theory, though not practically, unlike the 
institution of American slavery. The people, 
still living in their communes, still clung to 
the figment of their freedom, not really under- 
standing that they were slaves, but feeling 
rather that they were freemen whose sacred 
rights had been cruelly invaded. That they 
were giving to hard masters the fruit of their 
toil on their own lands. 

Now that Russia was becoming a modern 
state, it required more money to govern her. 
Civilization is costly, and the revenues must 
not be fluctuating. Boris saw they could 
only be made sure by attaching to the soil the 
peasant, whose labor was at the foundation 
of the prosperity of the state. It was the peas- 
ant who bore the weight of an expanded civi- 
lization which he did not share! The visitor 
at Moscow to-day may see in the KremHn a 
wonderful tower, 270 feet high, which was 
erected ifi honor of Ivan the Great by the 
usurper Boris; but the monument which keeps 
his memory alive is the more stupendous one 
of — Serfdom. 

The expected increase in prosperity from 
the new system did not immediately come. 
The revenues were less than before. Bands 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 10 1 

of fugitive serfs were fleeing from their 
masters and joining the community of free 
Cossacks on the Don. Lands were untilled, 
there was misery, and at last there was famine, 
and then discontent and demorahzation ex- 
tending to the upper classes, and a diminished 
income which finally bore upon the Tsar him- 
self. 

Suddenly there came a rumor that Dmitri, 
the son of Ivan the Terrible, was not dead! 
He was living, in Poland, and with incon- 
testable proofs of his identity was coming to 
claim his own. In 1604 he crossed the fron- 
tier, and thousands of discontented people 
flocked to his standard with wild enthusiasm. 
Boris had died just before Dimitri reached 
Moscow. He entered the city, and the in- 
fatuated people placed in his hand and upon 
his head the scepter and the crown of Ivan 
IV.; and after making sure that the wife and 
the son of Boris Godunof were strangled, 
this amazing Pretender commenced his 
reign. 

An extraordinary thing had happened. A 
nemeless adventurer and impostor had been 
received with tears of joy as the son of Ivan 
and of St. Vladimir, even the seventh wife of 



io2 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

Ivan the Terrible recognizing and embracing 
him as her son! But Dmitri had not the wis- 
dom to keep what his cunning had won. His 
Polish wife came, followed by a suite of Polish 
Catholics, who began to carry things with a 
high hand. The clergy was offended and 
soon enraged. In five years Dmitri was as- 
sassinated, and his mutilated corpse was lying 
in the palace at the Kremlin, an object of 
insult and derision; and then, for Russia there 
came another chaos. 

For a brief period Vasili Shuiski, head of 
one of the princely families, reigned, while 
two more '' false Dmitris " appeared, one from 
Sweden and the other from Poland. The 
cause of the latter was upheld by the King of 
Poland, with the ulterior purpose of bringing 
the disordered state of Russia under the 
Polish crown, and making one great Slav 
kingdom with its center at Cracow. 

This brought the needed crisis. It had been 
civil war until then. Now there developed a 
national uprising, in which all classes united 
in expelling the impostors and intruders. 
Then a great National Assembly gathered at 
Moscow in 1613, to elect a Tsar. The name 
of Romanoff had a kinship by marriage with 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 103 

Ivan IV., and yet it was unstained by crime. 
The newly awakened patriotism turned in- 
stinctively toward that, as the highest expres- 
sion of their hopes; and Mikhail Romanoff, a 
youth only sixteen, was elected Tsar. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

In the building of an empire there are two 
processes — the building up, and the tearing 
down. The plow is no less essential than the 
trowel. The period after Boris had been for 
Russia the period of the wholesome plow. 
The harvest was far off. But the name 
Romanoff was going to stand for another 
Russia, not like the old Russia of Kief, nor 
yet the new Russia of Moscow; but another 
and a Europeanized Russia, in which, after 
long struggles, the Slavonic and half-Asiatic 
giant was going to tear down the walls of 
separation, escape from his barbarism, and 
compel Europe to share with him her civili- 
zation. 

The man who was to make the first breach 
in the walls was the grandson of Mikhail 
Romanoff — Peter, known as '' The Great." 
But the mills of the gods grind slowly — espe- 
cially when they have a great work in hand; 
and there were to be three colorless reigns 

J04 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 105 

before the coming of the Liberator in 1689 — 
seventy-six years before they would learn that 
to have a savage despot seated on a barbaric 
throne, with crown and robes incrusted with 
jewels, and terrorizing a brutish, ignorant, and 
barbaric people — was not to be Great. 

The reigns of Mikhail and of his son Alexis 
and his grandson Feodor were to be reigns of 
preparation and reform. Of course there 
were turbulent uprisings and foreign wars, 
and perils on the frontiers near the Baltic and 
the Black seas. But Russia was gaining in 
ascendency while Poland, from whom she had 
narrowly escaped, was fast declining. The 
European rulers began to see advantages 
for themselves from Russian alliances. Gus- 
tavus Adolphus, King of Sweden and 
champion of Protestantism, made an elo- 
quent appeal to the Tsar to join him 
against Catholic Poland — '' Was not the 
Romish Church their common enemy? 
— and were they not neighbors? — and when 
your neighbor's house is afire, is it not 
the part of wisdom and prudence to help to 
put it out?" Poland suffered a serious blow 
when a large body of Cossacks, who were her 
vassals, and her chief arm of defense in the 



lo6 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

Southeast, in 1681 transferred themselves 
bodily to Russia. 

The Cossacks were a Slavonic people, with 
no doubt a plentiful infusion of Asiatic blood, 
and their name in the Tatar language meant 
Freebooters. They had long dwelt about the 
Don and the Dnieper, in what is known as 
Little Russia, a free and rugged community 
which was recruited by Russians after the 
Tatar invasion and Polish conquest, by op- 
pressed peasants after the creation of serfdom, 
and by adventurers and fugitives from justice 
at all times. It was a military organization, 
and its Constitution was a pure democracy. 
Freedom and independence were their first 
necessity. Their Hetman, or chief, held of- 
fice for one year only, and anyone might at- 
tain to that position. Their horsemanship 
was unrivaled — they were fearless and endur- 
ing, and stood ready to sell their services to 
the Khan of Tatary, the King of Poland, or 
to the Tsar of Russia. In fact, they were the 
Northmen of the South and East, and are 
now — the Rough-Riders of Russia. 

They had long ago divided into two bands, 
the " Cossacks of the Dnieper," loosely 
bound to Poland, and the '^ Cossacks of the 
Don/' owning the sovereignty of Russia. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE 107 

The services of these fearless adventurers were 
invaluable as a protection from Turks and 
Tatars; and, as we have seen in the matter of 
Siberia, they sometimes brought back prizes 
which offset their misdoings. The King of 
Poland unwisely attempted to proselyte his 
Cossacks of the Dnieper, sent Jesuit mission- 
aries among them, and then concluded to 
break their spirit by severities and make of 
them obedient loyal Catholic subjects. He 
might as well have tried to chain the winds. 
They offered to the Tsar their allegiance in 
return for his protection, and in 1681 all of the 
Cossacks, of the Dnieper as well as the Don, 
were gathered under Russian sovereignty. It 
was this event which, in the long struggle 
with Poland, turned the scales at last in favor 
of Russia. 

One of the most important occurrences in 
this reign was the attempt of the Patriarch 
Nikon to establish an authority in the East 
similar to that of the Pope in the West — and 
in many ways to Latinize the Church. It was 
virtually placing the Tsar under spiritual au- 
thority, and was put down by a popular re- 
volt — followed by stricter orthodox methods 
in a popular Church. 

Mikhail died in 1645, ^^^ was succeeded by 



lo8 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

his son Alexis. The new Tsar sent an envoy 
to Charles the First of England to announce 
his succession. He arrived with his letter to 
the King at an inopportune time. He 
was on trial for his life. The Russian could 
not comprehend such a condition, and haugh- 
tily refused to treat with anyone but the King. 
He was received with much ceremony by the 
House of Lords, and then to their consterna- 
tion arose and said: ''I have come from my 
sovereign charged with an important message 
to your King — Charles the First. It is long 
since I came, and I have not been permitted 
to see him nor to deliver the letter from my 
master." The embarrassed English hoyars re- 
plied that they would give their reasons for 
this by letter. When the Tsar was informed 
by Charles H. of the execution of his father, 
sternly inflicted by his people, he could not 
comprehend such a condition. He at once 
forbade English merchants to live in any of 
his cities except Archangel, and sent money 
and presents to the exiled son. 

An interest attaches to the marriage of 
Alexis with Natalia, his second wife. He was 
dining with one of his boyars and was at- 
tracted by a young girl, who was serving him. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. lop 

She was motherless, and had been adopted by 
her uncle the hoyar. The Tsar said to his 
friend soon after: '' I have found a husband 
for your Natalia." The husband was Alexis 
himself, and Natalia became the mother of 
Peter the Great. She was the first Princess 
who ever drew aside the curtains of her litter 
and permitted the people to look upon her 
face. Thrown much into the society of Euro- 
peans in her uncle's home, she was imbued 
with European ideas. It was no doubt she 
who first instilled the leaven of reform into 
the mind of her infant son Peter. 

One of the most important features of this 
reign was the development of the fanatical 
sect known as Raskolniks. They are the dis- 
senters or non-conformists of Russia. Their 
existence dates from the time of the Patri- 
arch Nikin — and what they considered his 
sacrilegious innovations. But as early as 
1476 there were the first stirrings of this 
movement when some daring and advanced 
innovators began to sing " O Lord, have 
mercy," instead of " Lord, have Mercy," and 
to say '' Alleluia " twice instead of three times, 
to the peril of their souls! But it was in the 
reign of Alexis that signs of falling away from 



no EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 

the faith spoken of in the Apocalypse were 
unmistakable. Foreign heretics who shaved 
their chins and smoked the accursed weed 
were tolerated in Holy Moscow. '' The 
number of the Beast " indicated the year 1666. 
It was evident that the end of the world was 
at hand! Such was the beginning of the 
Raskolniks, who now number 10,000,000 souls 
— a conservative Slavonic element which has 
been a difficult one to deal with. 

Upon the death of Alexis, in 1676, his eld- 
est son Feodor succeeded him. It is only 
necessary to mention one significant act in his 
short reign — the destruction of the Books of 
Pedigrees. The question of precedence 
among the great families was the source of 
endless disputes, and no man would accept a 
position inferior to any held by his ancestors, 
nor would serve under a man with an ancestry 
inferior to his own. Feodor asked that the 
Books of Pedigrees be sent to him for exami- 
nation, and then had them every one thrown 
into the fire and burned. This must have 
been his last act, for his death and this holo- 
caust of ancestral claims both occurred in the 
year 1682. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

A HISTORY of Russia naively designates one 
of its chapters *' The Period of Troubles " ! 
When was there not a period of troubles in 
this land? The historian wearies, and doubt- 
less the reader too, of such prolonged dis- 
order and calamity. But a chapter telling of 
peace and tranquiUity would have to be in- 
vented. The particular sort of trouble that 
developed upon the death of Feodor was of a 
new variety. Alexis had left two families of 
children, one by his first wife and the other by 
Natalia. There is not time to tell of all the 
steps by which Sophia, daughter of the first 
marriage, came to be the power behind the 
throne upon which sat her feeble brother Ivan, 
and her half-brother Peter, aged ten years. 
Sophia was an ambitious, strong-willed, 
strong-minded woman, who dared to emanci- 
pate herself from the tyranny of Russian 
custom. 

The terem, of which we hear so much, 



112 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

was the part of the palace sacred to the 
Tsaritsa and the Princesses — upon whose 
faces no man ever looked. If a physician were 
needed he might feel the pulse and the tem- 
perature through a piece of gauze — but see 
the face never. It is said that two nobles who 
one day accidentally met Natalia coming from 
her chapel were deprived of rank in conse- 
quence. 

But the terem, with '' its twenty-seven 
locks," was not going to confine the sister of 
Peter. She met the eyes of men in public; 
studied them well, too; and then selected the 
instruments for her designs of effacing Peter 
and his mother, and herself becoming sover- 
eign indeed. A rumor was circulated that the 
imbecile Ivan (who was alive) had been 
strangled by Natalia's family. In the tumult 
which followed one of her brothers, Peter's 
uncle, was torn from Natalia's arms and cut to 
pieces. But this was only one small incident 
in the horrid tragedy. Then, after discovering 
that the Prince was not dead, the bloodstains 
in the palace were washed up, and the two 
brothers were placed upon the throne under 
the Regency of Sophia. But while she was 
outraging the feelings of the people by her 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 113 

contempt for ancient customs, and while her 
friendship with her Minister, Prince GaUtsuin, 
was becoming a pubHc scandal, Sophia was at 
the same time being defeated in a campaign 
against the Turks at the Crimea; and her 
popularity was gone. 

In the meantime Peter was growing. With 
no training, no education, he was in his own 
disorderly, undisciplined fashion struggling up 
into manhood under the tutelage of a quick, 
strong intelligence, a hungry desire to know, 
and a hot, imperious temper. His first toys 
were drums and swords, and he first studied 
history from colored German prints; and as 
he grew older never wearied of reading about 
Ivan the Terrible. His delight was to go out 
upon the streets of Moscow and pick up 
strange bits of information from foreign ad- 
venturers about the habits and customs of 
their countries. He played at soldiers with 
his boy companions, and after finding how 
they did such things in Germany and in Eng- 
land, drilled his troops after the European 
fashion. But it was when he first saw a boat 
so built that it could go with or against the 
wind, that his strongest instinct was awak- 
ened. He would not rest until he had learned 



114 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

how to make and then to manage it. When 
this strange, passionate, self-willed boy was 
seventeen years old, he realized that his sister 
was scheming for the ruin of himself and his 
mother. In the rupture that followed, the 
people deserted Sophia and flocked about 
Peter. He placed his sister in a monastery, 
where, after fifteen years of fruitless intrigue 
and conspiracy, she was to die. Then, con- 
jointly with his unfortunate brother, he com- 
menced his reign (1689). 

If Sophia had freed herself from the cus- 
tomary seclusion of Princesses, Peter emanci- 
pated himself from the usual proprieties of the 
palace. Both were scandalous. One had 
harangued soldiers and walked with her veil 
lifted, the other was swinging an ax like a 
carpenter, rowing like a Cossack, or fighting 
mimic battles with his grooms, who not in- 
frequently knocked him down. In 1693 he 
gratified one great thirst and longing. With 
a large suite he went up to Archangel — and 
for the first time a Tsar looked out upon the 
sea! He ate and drank with the foreign mer- 
chants, and took deep draughts of the stimu- 
lating air from the west. He established a 
dock-yard, and while his first ship was build- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. "S 

ing made perilous trips upon that unknown 
ocean from which Russia had all its life been 
shut out! His ship was the first to bear a 
Russian flag into foreign waters, and now 
Peter had taken the first step toward learning 
how to build a navy, but he had no place yet 
to use one. So he turned his nimble activi- 
ties toward the Black Sea. He had only to 
capture Azof in the Crimea from the Turks, 
and he would have a sea for his navy — and 
then might easily make the navy for his sea! 
So he went down, carrying his soldiers and 
his new European tactics — in which no one 
beheved — gathered up his Cossacks, and 
the attack was made, first with utter failure — 
all on account of the new tactics — and then at 
last came overwhelming success; and a tri- 
umphant return (1676) to Moscow under 
arches and garlands of flowers. Three thou- 
sand Russian families were sent to colonize 
Azof, which was guarded by some regiments 
of the Streltsui and by Cossacks — and now 
there must be a navy. 

There must be nine ships of the line, and 
twenty frigates carrying fifty guns, and bomb- 
ships, and fireships. That would require a 
great deal of money. It was then that the 



ii6 EVOLUTION OF AM EMPIRE. 

utility of the system of serfdom became ap- 
parent. The prelates and monasteries were 
taxed — one vessel to every eighty thousand serfs! 
— according to their wealth all the orders of 
nobility to bear their portion in the same way, 
and the peasants toiled on, never dreaming 
that they were building a great navy for the 
great Tsar. Peter then sent fifty young no- 
bles of the court to Venice, England, and the 
Netherlands to learn the arts of shipbuilding 
and seamanship and gunnery. But how 
could he be sure of the knowledge and the 
science of these idle youths — unless he 
himself owned it and knew better than 
they? The time had come for his long- 
indulged dream of visiting the Western 
kingdoms. 

But while there were rejoicings at the vic- 
tory over the Turks, there was a feeling of 
universal disgust at the new order of things; 
with the militia (the Streltsui) because for- 
eigners were preferred to them and because 
they were subjected to an unaccustomed dis- 
cipline; with the nobles because their children 
were sent into foreign lands among heretics 
to learn trades like mechanics; and with the 
landowners and clergy because the cost of 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 117 

equipping a great fleet fell upon them. All 
classes were ripe for a revolt. 

Sophia, from her cloister, was in corre- 
spondence with her agents, and a con- 
spiracy ripened to overthrow Peter and 
his reforms. As the Tsar was one even- 
ing sitting down to an entertainment 
with a large party of ladies and gen- 
tlemen, word was brought that someone 
desired to see him privately upon an impor- 
tant matter. He promptly excused himself 
and was taken in a sledge to the appointed 
place. There he graciously sat down to sup- 
per with a number of gentlemen, as if per- 
fectly ignorant of their plans. Suddenly his 
guard arrived, entered the house, and ar- 
rested the entire party, after which Peter re- 
turned in the best of humor to his interrupted 
banquet, quite as if nothing had happened. 
The next day the prisoners under torture re- 
vealed the plot to assassinate him and then lay 
it to the foreigners, this to be followed by a 
general massacre of Europeans — men, wo- 
men, and children. The ringleaders were 
first dismembered, then beheaded — their 
legs and arms being displayed in conspicu- 
ous places in the city, and the rest of the 



Il8 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

conspirators, excepting his sister Sophia, were 
sent to Siberia. 

With this parting and salutary lesson to his 
subjects in 1697, Peter started upon his 
strange travels — in quest of the arts of civiH- 
zation ! 

The embassy was composed of 270 persons. 
Among them was a young man twenty-five 
years old, calling himself Peter Mikhailof, 
who a few weeks later might have been 
seen at Saardam in Holland, in complete 
outfit of workman's clothe^, in dust and 
by the sweat of his brow learning the 
art of ship-carpentry. Such was the first 
introduction to Europe of the Tsar of 
Russia! They had long heard of this auto- 
crat before whom millions trembled, rul- 
ing like a savage despot in the midst of 
splendors rivaling the Arabian Nights. 
Now they saw him! And the amazement 
can scarcely be described. He dined with 
the Great Electress Sophia, afterwards first 
Queen of Prussia, and she wrote of him: 
'' Nature has given him an infinity of wit. 
With advantages he might have been an ac- 
complished man. What a pity his manners 
are not less boorish! " 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 119 

But Peter was not thinking of the impres- 
sion he made. With an insatiable inquisitive- 
ness and an omnivorous curiosity, he was 
looking for the secret of power in nations. 
Nothing escaped him — cutlery, rope-making, 
paper manufacture, whaling industry, surgery, 
microscopy; he was engaging artists, officers, 
engineers, surgeons, buying models of every- 
thing he saw — or standing lost in admiration 
of a traveling dentist plying his craft in the 
market, whom he took home to his lodgings, 
learned the use of the instruments himself, 
then practiced his new art upon his fol- 
lowers. 

At The Hague he endured the splendid 
public reception, then hurried off his gold- 
trimmed coat, his wig and hat and white 
feathers, and was amid grime and dust ex- 
amining grist-mills, and ferry-boats, and irri- 
gating machines. To a lady he saw on the 
street at Amsterdam he shouted ''Stop!" 
then dragged out her enameled watch, exam- 
ined it, and put it back without a word. A 
nobleman's wig in similar unceremonious 
fashion he snatched from his head, turned it 
inside out, and, not being pleased with its 
make, threw it on the floor. 



I20 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

Perhaps Holland heard without regret that 
her guest was going to England, where 
he was told the instruction was based 
upon the principles of ship-building and 
he might learn more in a few weeks 
than by a year's study elsewhere. King 
WilHam III. placed a fleet at his dis- 
posal, and also a palace upon his arrival in 
London. A violent storm alarmed many on 
the way to England, but Peter enjoyed it and 
humorously said, '' T3id you ever hear of a 
Tsar being lost in the North Sea? " England 
was no less astonished than Holland at her 
guest, but William HI., the wisest sover- 
eign' in Europe, we learn was amazed at the 
vigor and originality of his mind. The wise 
Bishop Burnet wrote of him: '' He is mechan- 
ically turned, and more fitted to be a carpenter 
than a Prince. He told me he designed a 
great fleet for attacking the Turkish Empire, 
but he does not seem to me capable of so 
great an enterprise." This throws more light 
upon the limitations of Bishop Burnet than 
those of Peter the Great, and fairly illustrates 
the incompetency of contemporary estimates 
of genius; or, perhaps, the inability of talent 
to take the full measure of genius at any time. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 1 21 

The good Bishop adds that he adores the wise 
Providence which '' has raised up such a 
furious man to reign over such a part of the 
world." Louis XIV. " had procured the 
postponement of the honor of his visit"; so 
Peter prepared, after visiting Vienna, to go to 
Venice, but receiving disturbing news of 
matters at home, this unciviHzed civilizer, this 
barbarian reformer of barbarism, turned his 
face toward Moscow. 

There was widespread dissatisfaction in the 
empire. The Streltsui (mihtia) was rebel- 
lious, the heavily taxed landowners were 
angry, and the people disgusted by the prev- 
alence of German clothes and shaved faces. 
Had not the wise Ivan IV. said: "To shave is 
a sin that the blood of all the martyrs could 
not cleanse"! And who had ever before 
seen a Tsar of Moscow quit Holy Russia to 
wander in foreign lands among Turks and 
Germans? for both were alike to them. Then 
it was rumored that Peter had gone in disguise 
to Stockholm, and that the Queen of Sweden 
had put him into a cask lined with nails to 
throw him into the sea, and he had only been 
saved by one of his guards taking his place; 
and some years later many still believed that 



122 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 

it was a false Tsar who returned to them in 
1700 — that the true Tsar was still a prisoner 
at Stockholm, attached to a post. Sophia 
wrote to the Streltsui — " You suffer — but you 
will suffer more. Why do you wait? March 
on Moscow. There is no news of the Tsar." 
The army was told that he was dead, and that 
the boyars were scheming to kill his infant son 
Alexis and then get into power again. Thou- 
sands of revolted troops from Azof began to 
pour into Moscow, then there was a rumor 
that the foreigners and the Germans — who 
were introducing the smoking of tobacco and 
shaving, to the utter destruction of the holy 
faith — were planning to seize the town. Peter 
returned to find Moscow the prey to wild dis- 
order, in the hands of scheming revolutionists 
and mutineers. He concluded it was the right 
time to give a lesson which would never be 
forgotten. He would make the partisans of 
Old Russia feel the weight of his hand in a 
way that would remind them of Ivan IV. 

On the day of his return the nobles all pre- 
sented themselves, laying their faces, as was 
the custom, in the dust. After courteously 
returning their salutations, Peter ordered that 
every one of them be immediately shaved; and 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 123 

as this was one of the arts he had practiced 
while abroad he initiated the process by skill- 
fully applying the razor himself to a few of the 
long-beards. Then the inquiry into the re- 
bellion commenced. The Patriarch tried to 
appease the wrath of the Tsar, who an- 
swered: " Know that I venerate God and his 
Mother as much as you do. But also know 
that I shall protect my people and punish 
rebels." The " chastisement " was worthy of 
Ivan the Terrible. The details of its infliction 
are too dreadful to relate, and we read with 
incredulous horror that " the terrible carpen- 
ter of Saardam plied his own ax in the horri- 
ble employment — and that on the last day 
Peter himself put to death eighty-four of the 
Streitsui, " compelling his boyars to assist " — 
in inflicting this '' chastisement! " 



CHAPTER XV. 

The Baltic was at this time a Swedish sea. 
Finland, Livonia, and all the territory on the 
eastern coast, where once the Russians and the 
German knights had struggled, was now 
under the sovereignty of an inexperienced 
young king who had just ascended the throne 
of his father Charles XL, King of Sweden. If 
Peter ever " opened a window " into the 
West, it must be done by first breaking 
through this Swedish wall. Livonia was 
deeply aggrieved just now because of some 
oppressive measures against her, and her 
astute minister, Patkul, suggested to the 
King of Poland that he form a coalition be- 
tween that kingdom, Denmark, and Russia for 
the purpose of breaking the aggressive Scan- 
dinavian power in the North. The time was 
favorable, with disturbed conditions in 
Sweden, and a youth of eighteen without ex- 
perience upon the throne. The Tsar, who 
had recently returned from abroad and had 

124 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 125 

settled matters with his StreUsui in Moscow, 
saw in this enterprise just the opportunity he 
desired, and joined the coaHtion. 

At the Battle of Narva (1700) there were 
two surprises: one when Peter found that he 
knew almost nothing about the art of warfare, 
and the other when it was revealed to Charles 
XII. that he was a military genius and his nat- 
ural vocation was that of a conqueror. But 
if Charles was intoxicated by his enormous 
success, Peter accepted his humiliating defeat 
almost gratefully as a harsh lesson in military^ 
art. The sacrifice of men had been terrible, 
but the lesson was not lost. The next year 
there were small Russian victories, and these 
crept nearer and nearer to the Baltic, until at 
last the river upon which the great Nevski 
won his surname was reached — and the Neva 
was his! Peter lost no time. He personally 
superintended the building of a fort and then 
a church which were to be the nucleus of a 
city; and there may be seen in St. Petersburg 
to-day the little hut in which lived the Tsar 
while he was founding the capital which bears 
his name (1703). No wonder it seemed a 
wild project to build the capital of an empire, 
not only on its frontier, but upon low marshy 



126 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

ground subject to the encroachments of the 
sea from which it had only half emerged; and 
in a latitude where for two months of the year 
the twilight and the dawn meet and there is 
no night, and where for two other months the 
sun rises after nine in the morning and sets 
before three. Not only must he build a city, 
but create the dry land for it to stand upon; 
and it is said that six hundred acres have been 
reclaimed from the sea at St. Petersburg since 
it was founded. 

Charles XI I. was too much occupied to 
care for these insignificant events. He sent 
word that when he had time he would come 
and burn down Peter's wooden town. He 
was leading a victorious army toward Poland, 
he had beheaded the traitorous Patkul, and 
everything was bowing before him. The 
great Marlborough was suing for his aid in the 
coalition against Louis XIV. in the War of 
the Spanish Succession. Flushed with vic- 
tory, Charles felt that the fate of Europe was 
lying in his hands. He had only to decide in 
which direction to move — whether to help to 
curb the ambition of the Grand Monarque in 
the West, or to carry out his first design of 
crushing the rising power of the Great Auto- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 127 

crat in the East. He preferred the latter. 
The question then arose whether to enter 
Russia by the North - or by way of Poland, 
where he was now master. The scale was 
turned probably by learning that the Cossacks 
in Little Russia were growing impatient and 
were ready for rebellion against the Tsar. 

Peter was anxious to prevent the invasion. 
He had a wholesome admiration for the terri- 
ble Swedish army, not much confidence in his 
own, and his empire was in disorder. He 
sent word to Charles that he would be satis- 
fied to withdraw from the West if he could 
have one port on the Baltic. The king's 
haughty reply was: *' Tell your Tsar I will 
treat with him in Moscow," to which Peter 
rejoined: '' My brother Charles wants to play 
the part of an Alexander, but he will not find 
in me a Darius." 

It is possible that upon Ivan Mazeppa, who 
was chief or Hetman of the Cossacks at this 
time, rests the responsibility of the crushing 
defeat which terminated the brilliant career of 
Charles XII. Mazeppa was the Polish gen- 
tleman whose punishment at the hands of an 
infuriated husband has been the subject of 
poems by Lord Byron and Pushkin, and also 



128 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

of a painting by Horace Vernet. This pic- 
turesque traitor, who always rose upon the 
necks of the people who trusted him, whose 
friendships he one after another invariably be- 
trayed, reached a final climax of infamy by 
offering to sacrifice the Tsar, the friend who 
beheved in him so absolutely that he sent into 
exile or to death anyone who questioned his 
fidelity. Mazeppa had been with Peter at 
Azof, and abundant honors were waiting for 
him; but he was dazzled by the career of the 
Swedish conqueror, and believed he might 
rise higher under Charles XII. than under his 
rough, imperious master at Moscow. So he 
wrote the King that he might rely upon him 
to join him with 40,000 Cossacks in Little 
Russia. He thought it would be an easy mat- 
ter to turn the irritated Cossacks from the 
Tsar. They were restive under the severity 
of the new military regime, and also smarting 
under a decree forbidding them to receive any 
more fugitive peasants fleeing from serfdom. 
But he had miscalculated their lack of fidelity 
and his own power over them. 

It was this fatal promise, which was never 
to be kept, that probably lured Charles to his 
ruin. After a long and disastrous campaign 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 129 

he met his final crushing defeat at Poltova in 
1709. The King and Mazeppa, companions 
in flight, together entered the Sultan's do- 
minions as fugitives, and of the army before 
which a short time ago Europe had trembled 
— there was left not one battalion. 

The Baltic was passing into new hands. 
" The window " opening upon the West was 
to become a door, and the key of the door was 
to be kept upon the side toward Russia! 
Sweden, which under Gustavus Adolphus, 
Charles XL, and Charles XII. had played such 
a glorious part, was never to do it again; and 
the place she had left vacant was to be filled 
by a new and greater Power. Russia had dis- 
pelled the awakened dream of a great Scan- 
dinavian Empire and — so long excluded and 
humiliated — was going to make a triumphal 
entry into the family of European nations. 

The Tsar, with his innovations and reforms, 
was vindicated. For breadth of design and 
statesmanship there was not one sovereign in 
the coaHtion who could compare with this 
man who. Bishop Burnet thought, was better 
fitted for a mechanic than a Prince — and " in- 
capable of a great enterprise." 

Of Charles XII. it has been said that 



13® EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

'' he was a hero of the Scandinavian Edda set 
down in the wrong century/' and again that 
he was the last of the Vikings, and of the 
Varangian Princes. But Mazeppa said of 
him, when dying in exile: '' How could I have 
been seduced in my old age by a mihtary 
vagabond! " 

Ivan, Peter's infirm brother and associate 
upon the throne, had died in 1696. Another 
oppressive tie had also been severed. He had 
married at seventeen Eudoxia, belonging to 
a proud conservative Russian family. He had 
never loved her, and when she scornfully op- 
posed his policy of reform, she became an ob- 
ject of intense aversion. After his triumph at 
Azof, he sent orders that the Tsaritsa must not 
be at the palace upon his return, and soon 
thereafter she was separated from her child 
Alexis, placed in a monastery, and finally di-. 
vorced. At the surrender of Marienburg in 
Livonia (1702) there was among the captives 
the family of a Lutheran pastor named Gliick. 
Catherine, a young girl of sixteen, a servant 
in the family, had just married a Swedish 
soldier, who was killed the following day in 
battle. We would have to look far for a 
more romantic story than that of this Protes- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 131 

tant waiting-maid. Menschikof, Peter's great 
general, was attracted by her beauty and took 
the young girl under his protection. But 
when the Tsar was also fascinated by her art- 
less simplicity, she was transferred to his more 
distinguished protection. Little did Catherine 
think when weeping for her Swedish lover in 
Pastor Gliick's kitchen that she was on her 
way to the throne of Russia. But such was 
her destiny. She did not know how to write 
her name, but she knew something which 
served her beter. She knew how to establish 
an influence possessed by no one else over the 
strange husband to whom in 1707 she was 
secretly married. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

While Peter was absorbing more territory 
on the Baltic, and while he was with frenzied 
haste building his new city, Charles XII. was 
still hiding in Poland. The Turks were burn- 
ing with desire to recapture Azof, and the 
Khan of Tartary had his own revenges and re- 
prisals at heart urging him on; so, at the in- 
stigation of Charles and the Khan, the Sultan 
declared war against Russia in 1710. 

It seemed to the Russian people like a re- 
vival of their ancient glories when their Tsar, 
with a great army, was following in the foot- 
steps of the Grand Princes to free the Slav 
race from its old infidel enemies. Catherine, 
from whom Peter would not be separated, 
was to be his companion in the campaign. 
But the enterprise, so fascinating in prospect, 
was attended with unexpected disaster and 
suffering; and the climax was finally reached 
when Peter was lying ill in his tent, with an 
army of only 24,000 men about to face one 

132 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 133 

of over 200,000 — Tatars and Turks — com- 
manded by skilled generals, adherents of 
Charles XII. This was probably the darkest 
hour in Peter's career. The work of his life 
was about to be overthrown; it seemed as if a 
miracle could not save him. Someone sug- 
gested that the cupidity of the Grand Vizier, 
Balthazi, was the vulnerable spot. He loved 
gold better than glory. Two hundred thou- 
sand rubles were quickly collected — Catherine 
throwing in her jewels as an added lure. The 
shining gold, with the glittering jewels on top, 
averted the inevitable fate. Balthazi con- 
sented to treat for peace upon condition that 
Charles XII. be permitted to go back to 
Sweden unmolested, and that Azof be relin- 
quished (Treaty of Pruth). Peter's heart was 
sorely wrung by giving up Azof, and his fleet, 
and his outlet to the Southern seas. The 
peace was costly, but welcome; and Catherine 
had earned his everlasting gratitude. 

The Tsar now returned to the task of re- 
forming his people. There were to be no 
more prostrations before him: the petitioner 
must call himself " subject," not " slave," and 
must stand upright like a man in his presence, 
even if he had to use his stick to make him do 



134 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

so! The Asiatic caftan and the flowing robes 
must go along with the beards ; the terem, with 
its "twenty-seven locks," must be abolished; 
the wiv^s and daughters dragged from their 
seclusion must be clothed like Europeans. 
Marriage must not be compelled, and the be- 
trothed might see each other before the 
wedding ceremony. 

If it is dif^cult to civilize one willing bar- 
barian, what must it have been to compel 
millions to put on the garment of respecta- 
bility which they hated! Never before was 
there such a complete social reorganization, 
so entire a change in the daily habits of a 
whole people; and so violently effected. It 
required a soul of iron and a hand of steel to 
do it; and it has been well said that Russia 
was knouted into civilization. A secret 
service was instituted to see that the changes 
were adopted, and the knout and the ax were 
the accompaniment of every reforming edict. 
This extraordinary man was by main force 
dragging a sullen and angry nation into the 
path of progress, and by artificial means try- 
ing to accomplish in a lifetime what had been 
the growth of centuries in other lands. 

Then there must be no competing authori- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. I35 

ties — no suns shining near to the Central 
Sun. The Patriarchate — which, after Nikon's 
attempt in the reign of his grandfather, had 
been shorn of authority — was now aboHshed, 
and a Holy Synod of his own appointing 
took its place. For the Sohor or States-Gen- 
eral there was substituted a Senate, also of 
his own appointing. The Streltsui, or militia, 
was swept out of existence; the military Cos- 
sacks were deprived of their Hetman or leader; 
and a standing army, raised by recruiting, re- 
placed these organizations. Nobility meant 
service. Every nobleman while he lived must 
serve the state, and he held his fief only upon 
condition of such service; while a nobleman 
who could not read or write in a foreign 
tongue forfeited his birthright. This was the 
way Peter fought idleness and ignorance in 
his land! New and freer municipal organiza- 
tions were given to the cities, enlarging the 
privileges of the citizens ; schools and colleges 
were established; the awful punishment for 
debtors swept away. He was leveling up as 
well as leveling down — trying to create a 
great plateau of modern society, in which he 
alone towered high, rigid, and inexorable. 
If the attempt was impossible and against 



136 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

nature, if Peter violated every law of social 
development by such a monstrous creation of 
a modern state, what could have been done 
better? How long would it have taken Rus- 
sia to grow into modern civilization? And 
what would it be now if there had not been 
just such a strange being — with the nature 
and heart of a barbarian joined with a brain 
and an intelligence the peer of any in Europe, 
capable of seeing that the only hope for Rus- 
sia was by force to convert it from an Asiatic 
into a European state? 

One act bore with extreme severity upon 
the free peasantry. They were compelled to 
enroll themselves with the serfs in their Com- 
munes, or to be dealt with as vagrants. Peter 
has been censured for this and also for not 
extending his reforming broom to the Com- 
munes and overthrowing the whole patri- 
archal system under which they existed — a 
system so out of harmony with the mod- 
ern state he was creating. But it seems 
to the writer rather that he was guided by a 
sure instinct when he left untouched the one 
thing in a Slavonic state which was really 
Slavonic. He and the long line of rulers be- 
hind him had been ruling by virtue of an au- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. I37 

thority established by aliens. Russia had 
from the time of Rurik been governed and 
formed after foreign models. Peter was at 
least choosing better models than his prede- 
cessors. If it was an apparent mistake to 
build a modern, centralized state in the eigh- 
teenth century upon a social organization be- 
longing to the eleventh century, it may be 
that in so doing, an inspired despot builded 
wiser than he knew. May it not be that the 
final regeneration of that land is to come some 
day, from the leaven of native instincts in her 
peasantry, which have never been invaded by 
foreign influences and which have survived all 
the vicissitudes of a thousand years in Russia? 
The Raskolniks, composed chiefly of free 
peasants and the smaller merchant class, had 
fled in large numbers from these blasphemous 
changes — some among the Cossacks, and 
many more to the forests, hiding from perse- 
cution and from this reign of Satan. The 
more they studied the Apocalypse the plainer 
became the signs of the times. Satan was 
being let loose for a period. They had been 
looking for the coming of Antichrist and now 
he had come! The man in whom the spirit 
of Satan was incarnate was Peter the Great. 



138 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

How else could they explain such impious 
demeanor in a Tsar of Russia — except that he 
was of Satanic origin, and was the Devil in 
disguise? By his newly invented census had 
he not " numbered the people " — a thing ex- 
pressly forbidden? And his new " calendar," 
transferring September to January, was it 
not clearly a trick of Satan to steal the days of 
the Lord? And his new title Imperator (Em- 
peror), had it not a diabolic sound? And his 
order to shave, to disfigure the image of God! 
How would Christ recognize his own at the 
Last Day? 

Hunted like beasts, these people were living 
in wild communities, dying often by their own 
hands rather than yield the point of making 
the sign of the cross with two fingers instead 
of three — 2700 at one time voluntarily perish- 
ing in the flames, in a church where they had 
taken refuge. Peter put an end to their per- 
secution. They were permitted to practice 
their ancient rites in the cities without moles- 
tation, upon condition of paying a double 
poll-tax. 

The millions of Raskolniks in Russia to-day 
still consider New Russia a creation of the 
evil-one, and the Tsar as Antichrist. They 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. I39 

yield a sullen compliance — pray for the Tsar, 
then in private throw away the handle of a 
door if a heretic has touched it. It is a con- 
servative wSlavonic element which every Tsar 
since Mikhail Romanoff has had to deal with. 
Not one of the reforms was more odious to 
the people than the removal of the capital 
from Moscow to St. Petersburg. It violated 
the most sacred feelings of the nation; and 
many a soul was secretly looking forward to 
the time when there would be no Peter, and 
they would return to the shrine of revered as- 
sociations. But the new city grew in splen- 
dor — a city not of wood, to be the prey of con- 
flagrations hke Moscow; but of stone, the first 
Russia had yet possessed. The great Nevski 
was already there lying in a cathedral bearing 
his name, and the Cathedral of Sts. Peter 
and Paul was ready to entomb the fu- 
ture Tsars. And Peter held his court, 
a poor imitation of Versailles, and gave 
great entertainments at which the shy 
and embarrassed ladies in their new cos- 
tumes kept apart by themselves, and the at- 
tempt to introduce the European dances was 
a very sorry failure. In 1712 Peter planned 
a visit to Paris, with two ends in view — a 



I40 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

political alliance and a matrimonial one. He 
ardently desired to arrange for the future 
marriage of his little daughter Elizabeth with 
Louis XV., the infant King of France. 
Neither suit was successful, but it is interest- 
ing to learn how different was the impression 
he produced from the one twelve years before. 
Saint-Simon writes of him: '' His manner was 
at once the most majestic, the proudest, the 
most sustained, and at the same time the least 
embarrassing." That he was still eccentric 
may be judged from his call upon Mme. de 
Maintenon. She was ill in bed, and could not 
receive him; but he was not to be bafifled. 
He drew aside the bed-curtains and stared at 
her fixedly, while she in speechless indigna- 
tion glared at him. So, without one word, 
these two historic persons met — and parted! 
He probably felt curious to see what sort of 
a woman had enthralled and controlled the 
policy of Louis XIV. Peter did not intend to 
subject his wife to the criticism of the witty 
Frenchwomen, so prudently left her at home. 
Charles XH.died in 1718, and in 1721 there 
was at last peace with Sweden. But the sad- 
dest war of all, and one which was never to 
cease, was that in Peter's own household. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 141 

His son Alexis, possibly embittered by his 
mother's fate, and certainly by her influence, 
grew up into a sullen, morose, and perverse 
youth. In vain did his father strive to fit him 
for his great destiny. By no person in the 
empire — unless, perhaps, his mother — were 
Peter's reforms more detested than by the 
son and heir to whom he expected to intrust 
them. He was in close communication with 
his mother Eudoxia, who in her monastery, 
holding court like a Tsaritsa, was sur- 
rounded by intriguing and disaffected nobles 
— all praying for the death of Peter. Every 
method for reaching the head or heart of this 
incorrigible son utterly failed. During Pe- 
ter's absence abroad in 171 7, Alexis disap- 
peared. Tolstoi, the Tsar's emissary, after a 
long search tracked him to his hiding place 
and induced him to return. There was a ter- 
rible scene with his father, who had discov- 
ered that his son was more than perverse, he 
was a traitor — the center of a conspiracy, and 
in close relations with his enemies at home 
and abroad, betraying his interests to Ger- 
many and to Sweden. 

The plan, instigated by Eudoxia, was 
that Alexis, immediately upon the death of 



142 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

his father — which God was importuned to 
hasten — should return to Moscow, restore 
the picturesque old barbarism, abandon the 
territory on the Baltic, and the infant navy, 
and the city of his father's love; in other 
words, that he should scatter to the winds the 
prodigious results of his father's reign! It 
was monstrous — and so was its punishment! 
Eudoxia was whipped and placed in close con- 
finement, and thirty conspirators, members of 
her '' court," were in various ways butch- 
ered. Then Alexis, the confessed traitor, was 
tried by a tribunal at the head of which was 
Menschikof — and sentenced to death. 

On the morning of the 27th of June, 1718, 
the Tsar summoned his son to appear before 
nine of the greatest officers of the state. Con- 
cerning what happened, the lips of those nine 
men were forever sealed. But the day fol- 
lowing it was announced that Alexis, the son 
of the emperor, was dead; and it is be- 
lieved that he died under the knout. 

The question of succession now became a 
very grave one. Alexis, who had under com- 
pulsion married Charlotte of Brunswick, left 
a son Peter. The only other heirs were the 
Tsar's two daughters Anna and Elizabeth, the 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 143 

children of Catherine. Shortly after the 
tragedy of his son's death, Peter caused 
Catherine to be formally crowned Empress, 
probably in anticipation of his own death, 
which occurred in 1825. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

The chief objection to a wise and beneficent 
despotism is that its creator is not immortal. 
The trouble with the Alexanders and the 
Charlemagnes and the Peters is that the span 
of human life is too short for their magnifi- 
cent designs, which fall, while incomplete, 
into incompetent or vicious hands, and the 
work is overthrown. Peter's rest in his mau- 
soleum at Sts. Peter and Paul must have been 
uneasy if he saw the reigns immediately suc- 
ceeding his own. Not one man capable of 
a lofty patriotism like his, not one man work- 
ing with unselfish energy for Russia; but, just 
as in the olden time, oligarchic factions with 
leaders striving for that cause which would 
best protect and elevate themselves. Men- 
schikof, Apraxin, Tolstoi promoting the cause 
of Catherine that they may not suffer for the 
death sentence passed upon Alexis; Galitsuin 
and others seeing their interests in the suc- 

144 



. EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 145 

cession of Peter, son of Alexis and grandson 
of the Emperor. 

Catherine's harmless reign was over in two 
years (1727) and was followed by another, 
equally brief and harmless, by the young 
Peter II. The wily Menschikof succeeded in 
betrothing his daughter to the young Em- 
peror, but not in retaining his ascendency 
over the self-willed boy. 

We wonder if Peter saw his great minister 
scheming for wealth and for power, and then 
his fall, like Wolsey's, from his pinnacle. We 
wonder if he saw him with his own hands 
building his hut on the frozen plains of Siberia, 
clothed, not in rich furs and jewels, but 
bearded and in long, coarse, gray smock- 
frock; iiis daughter, the betrothed of an Em- 
peror, clad, not in ermine, but in sheep-skin. 
Perhaps the lesson with his master the Car- 
penter of Saardam served him in building his 
own shelter in that dread abode. Nor was 
he alone. He had the best of society, and at 
every turn of the wheel at St. Petersburg it 
had aristocratic recruits. The Galitsuins and 
the Dolgorukis would have joined him soon 
had they not died in prison, and many others 
had they not been broken on the wheel or be- 



146 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

headed by Anna, the coarse and vulgar wo- 
man who succeeded Peter 11. , when he sud- 
denly died in 1730. 

Anna Ivanovna was the daughter of 
Peter's brother Ivan V., who was asso- 
ciated with him upon the throne. She 
had the force to defeat an oligarchic at- 
tempt to tie her hands. The plan had 
originated with the Galitsuins and Dolgo- 
rukis, and was really calculated to benefit the 
state in a period of incompetent or vicious 
rulers by having the authority of the Crown 
limited by a council of eight ministers. But 
it was reactionary. It was introducing a 
principle which had been condemned, and 
was a veiled attempt to undo the work of the 
Ivans and the Romanoffs, and to place the real 
power as of old in the hands of ruling families. 
The plan fell, and the leaders fell with it, and 
a host of their followers. The executioners 
were busy at St. Petersburg, and the aristo- 
cratic colony in Siberia grew larger. 

Anna's reign was the period of a preponder- 
ating German influence in politics and at 
court. Germans held high positions; one of 
them, Gustav Biron, the highest and most in- 
fluential of all Anna's infatuation for this 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, I47 

man made him the ruling spirit in her reign 
and the Regent in the next, until he had his 
turn in disgrace and exile. Added to the dis- 
satisfaction on account of German ascendency 
was a growing feeling that the succession 
should come through Peter, instead of 
through Ivan, his insignificant associate upon 
the throne. Such was the prevailing senti- 
ment at the time of Anna's death (1740). The 
Tsaritsa named Ivan, a grand-nephew, the in- 
fant son of her niece Anna, her successor un- 
der the Regency of Biron, the man who had 
controlled the policy of the administration 
during her reign. 

This was only a brief and tragic episode. 
Biron was swiftly swept out of power and into 
exile, and succeeded in the Regency by Anna, 
the mother of the infant Emperor; then, fol- 
lowing quickly upon that, was a carefully ma- 
tured conspiracy formed in the interest of 
Elizabeth Petrovna, the beautiful daughter 
whose marriage with the young Louis XV. 
had been an object of the great Peter's hopes. 

In this connection it is well to mention that 
the terminations vkh and vna, so constantly 
met in Russian names, have an important sig- 
nificance — vkh meaning son of, and vna 



i4^ EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

daughter of. Elizabeth Petrovna is Elizabeth 
the daughter of Peter, and Feier Alexievich is 
Peter the son of Alexis. In like manner 
Tsarevich and Tsarevna are respectively the 
son and daughter of the Tsar; Czarevich and 
Czarevna being the modern form, and Czarina 
instead of Tsaritsa. The historian may for 
convenience omit the surname thus created, 
but in Russia it would be a great breach of de- 
corum to do so. 

By a sudden coup d'etat, Elizabeth Petrovna 
took her rightful place upon the throne of 
her father (1741). In the dead of night the 
unfortunate Anna and her husband were 
awakened, carried into exile, and their infant 
son Ivan VI. was immured in a prison, where 
he was to grow up to manhood, — shattered in 
mind by his horrible existence of twenty years, 
— and then to be mercifully put out of the way 
as a possible menace to the ambitious plans 
of a woman. 

Of the heads that dropped by orders of 
EHzabeth it is needless to speak; but of one 
that was spared there is an interesting ac- 
count. Ostermann, a German, had been vice 
chancellor to the Empress Anna, and had also 
brought about the downfall of Biron the Re- 



Evolution of an empire. 149 

gent. Now his turn had come. He was ta- 
ken to the place of execution with the rest; 
his gray head was laid upon the block, his 
collar unbuttoned and gown drawn back by 
the executioner — when a reprieve was an- 
nounced. Her Gracious Majesty was going 
to permit him to go to Siberia. He arose, 
bowed, said: '' I pray you give me back my 
wig," calmly put it on the head he had not 
lost, buttoned his shirt, replaced his gown, 
and started to join his company of friends — 
and of enemies — in exile. 

Elizabeth was a vain voluptuary. If any 
glory attaches to her reign it came from the 
stored energies left by her great father. The 
marvel is that in this succession of vicious and 
aimless tyrannies by shameless women and in- 
competent men, Russia did not fall into 
anarchy and revolution. But nothing was 
undone. The dignity of Moscow was pre- 
served by the fact that the coronations must 
take place there. But there was no longer a 
reactionary party scheming for a return to the 
Ancient City. The seed scattered by Peter 
had everywhere taken hold upon the soil, and 
now began to burst into flower. A university 
was founded at Moscow. St. Petersburg was 



150 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

filled with French artists and scholars, and had 
an Academy of Art and of Science, which the 
great Voltaire asked permission to join, 
while conferring with Ivan Shuvalof over the 
History of Peter the Great which he was then 
engaged in writing. There were no more 
ugly German costumes; French dress, man- 
ners and speech were the fashion. Russia was 
assimilating Europe: it had tried Holland un- 
der Peter, then Germany under Empress 
Anna; but found its true affinity with France 
under EHzabeth, when to write and speak 
French like a Parisian became the badge of 
high station and culture. 

So of its own momentum Russia had moved 
on without one strong competent person- 
ality at its head, and had become a tremen- 
dous force which must be reckoned with by 
the nations of Europe. In every great politi- 
cal combination the important question was, 
on which side she would throw her immense 
weight; and Elizabeth was courted and flat- 
tered to her heart's content by foreign diplo- 
matists and their masters. Frederick the 
Great had reason to regret that he had been 
witty at her expense. It was almost his un- 
doing by turning the scale against him at a 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 151 

critical moment. Elizabeth did not forget it 
and had her revenge when she joined Maria 
Theresa in the final struggle with Frederick 
in 1757. And Frederick also remembered it 
in 1760, when, as he dramatically expressed 
it, '' The Barbarians were in Berlin engaged 
in digging the grave of humanity." 

But all benefit from these enormous suc- 
cesses was abandoned, when the commanding 
Russian officer Apraxin mysteriously with- 
drew and returned with his army to Russia. 
This was undoubtedly part of a deeply laid 
plot of which Frederick was cognizant, and 
working in concert with a certain dis- 
tinguished lady in Elizabeth's own court — a 
clever puller of wires who was going to fill 
some important chapters in Russian history! 

The Empress had chosen for her successor 
her nephew Peter, son of her only sister and 
the Duke of Holstein. The far-seeing Fred- 
erick had brought about a marriage between 
this youth and a German Princess, Sophia of 
Anhalt-Zerbst. Then the Future Emperor 
Peter III. and his German bride took up their 
abode in the palace at St. Petersburg, she hav- 
ing been rechristened Catherine, upon adopt- 
ing the Greek faith. A mutual dislike deep- 



152 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

ened into hatred between this briUiant, clever 
woman and her vulgar and inferior husband; 
and there is little doubt that the treacherous 
conduct of the Russian commander was part 
of a plan to place her infant son Paul upon the 
throne instead of his father, and make her Re- 
gent. Elizabeth's death was apparently at 
hand and the general mistrust of Peter's fit- 
ness for the position opened the way for such 
a conspiracy — which, however, is not known, 
but only suspected. 

The one merciful edict which adorns this 
reign is the '' abolishing of the death penalty." 
But as the knout became more than ever ac- 
tive, we are left to infer that by a nice dis- 
tinction in the Russian mind death under that 
instrument of torture was not considered 
'' capital punishment." 

It is said that when the daughter of the 
austere Peter died, she left sixteen thousand 
dresses, thousands of slippers, and two large 
chests of silk stockings — a wardrobe which 
would have astonished her mother at the time 
she was serving the table of the Pastor Gliick. 
Elizabeth expired in 1761, and the throne 
passed to Peter TIL, grandson of Peter the 
Great and Catherine 1. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. I53 

The first act of the new Tsar was a de- 
lightful surprise to the nobility. He pub- 
lished a manifesto freeing the nobles from the 
obligation of service imposed by Peter the 
Great, saying that this law, which was wise at 
the time it was enacted, was no longer neces- 
sary, now that the nobility was enlightened 
and devoted to the service of their ruler. The 
grateful nobles talked of erecting a statue of 
gold to this benign sovereign, who in like 
manner abolished the Secret Court of Police 
and proclaimed pardon to thousands of polit- 
ical fugitives. The Birons were recalled from 
Siberia, and the old Duke of Kurland and his 
wife came back Hke shades from another 
world, after twenty years of exile. 

But this pleasant prelude was very brief. 
The nobles soon found that their golden idol 
would have to be made instead of very coarse 
clay. Nothing could exceed the grossness 
and the unbalanced folly of Peter's course. 
He reversed the whole attitude of the state 
toward Germany. So abject was his devo- 
tion to Frederick the Great that he restored 
to him the Russian conquests, and reached 
the limit which could be borne when he 
shouted at one of his orgies: " Let us drink to 



154 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

the health of our King and master Frederick. 
You may be assured if he should order it, I 
would make war on hell with all my empire." 
He was also planning to rid himself of Cath- 
erine and to disinherit her child Paul in favor 
of Ivan VL; and with this in view the unfor- 
tunate youth, who after his twenty years' im- 
prisonment was a mental wreck, was brought 
to St. Petersburg. 

Catherine's plans were carefully laid and 
then swiftly executed. The Emperor was ar- 
rested and his abdication demanded. He 
submitted as quietly as a child. Catherine 
writes: '' I then sent the deposed Emperor in 
the care of Alexis Orlof and some gentle and 
reasonable men to a palace fifteen miles from 
Peterhof, a secluded spot, but very pleas- 
ant." 

In four days it was announced that the late 
Emperor had " suddenly died of a colic to 
which he was subject." It is known that he 
was visited by Alexis Orlof and another of 
Catherine's agents in his '' pleasant " retreat, 
who saw him privately; that a violent strug- 
gle was heard in his room; and that he was 
found lying dead with the black and blue 
mark of a colossal hand on his throat. That 



\. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. I55 

the hand was Orlofs is not doubted; but 
whether acting under orders from Catherine 
or not will never be known. 

This is what is known as the '' Revolution 
of 1762/' which placed Catherine 11. upon 
the throne of Russia. Her son Paul was only 
six years old; and in less than two years Ivan 
VI., the only claimant to the throne who could 
become the center of a conspiracy against her 
authority, was most opportunely removed. 
It was said that his guards killed him to pre- 
^vent an attempted rescue. No one knows or 
ever will know whether or not Catherine was 
implicated in his '' taking off." But certainly 
nothing at the time could have pleased her 
better. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

European diplomacy at this period was 
centered about the perishing state of Poland. 
That kingdom, once so powerful, was becom- 
ing every year more enfeebled. 

It was a defective social organization and 
an arrogant nobility that ruined Poland. 
There existed only two classes — nobles and 
serfs. The business and trade of the state 
were in the hands of Germans and Jews, and 
there existed no national or middle class in 
which must reside the life of a modern state. 
In other words, Poland was patriarchal and 
mediaeval. She had become unsuited to her 
environment. Surrounded by powerful ab- 
solutisms which had grown out of the ruins of 
mediaeval forces, she in the eighteenth cen- 
tury was clinging to the traditions of feudal- 
ism as if it were still the twelfth century. It 
was in vain that her sons were patriotic, in 
vain that they struggled for reforms, in vain 
that they lay down and died upon battlefields. 

156 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 15 7 

She alone in Europe had not been borne along 
on that great wave of centraHzation long ago, 
and she had missed an essential experience. 
She was out of step with the march of civili- 
zation, and the advancing forces were going 
to run over her. 

The more enlightened Poles began too late 
to strive for a firm hereditary monarchy, and 
to try to curb the power of selfish nobles. 
Not only was their state falling to pieces 
within, but it was being crushed from without. 
Protestant Prussia in the West, Greek Russia 
in the East, and Austria on the South, each 
preparing to absorb all it could get away — 
not from Poland, but from each other. It 
was obvious that it was only a question of 
time when the feeble kingdom wedged in be- 
tween these powerful and hungry states must 
succumb; and for Russia, Austria, and Prus- 
sia it was simply a question as to the share 
which would fall to each. 

Such was the absorbing problem which em- 
ployed Catherine's powers from the early 
years of her reign almost to its close. Eu- 
rope soon saw that it was a woman of no 
ordinary ability who was sitting on the throne 
of Russia. In her foreign policy, and in the 



158 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

vigor infused into the internal administration 
of her empire, the master-hand became ap- 
parent. 

As a counter-move to her designs upon Po- 
land, the Turks were induced to harass her 
by declaring war upon Russia. There was a 
great surprise in store for Europe as well as 
for the Ottoman Empire. This dauntless wo- 
man was unprepared for such an emergency; 
but she wrote to one of her generals: " The 
Romans did not concern themselves with the 
number of their enemies; they only asked, 
* Where are they? ' " Her armies swept the 
Peninsula clear of Tatars and of Turks, and 
in 1 771 a Russian fleet was on the Black Sea, 
and the terror of Constantinople knew no 
bounds. If afifairs in Europe and disorders 
in her own empire had not been so pressing, 
the long-cherished dream of the Grand 
Princes might have been realized. 

A plague in Moscow broke out in 1771 
which so excited the superstitions of the peo- 
ple, that it led to an insurrection; immediately 
following this, a terrible demoralization was 
created in the South by an illiterate Cossack 
named Pugatchek, who announced that he 
was Peter the Third. He claimed that in- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 159 

stead of dying as was supposed, he had es- 
caped to the Ukraine, and was now going to 
St. Petersburg with an army to punish his wife 
Catherine and to place his son Paul upon the 
throne. As a pretender he was not dangerous, 
but as a rallying point for unhappy serfs and 
for an exasperated and suffering people look- 
ing for a leader, he did become a very for- 
midable menace, which finally developed 
into a Peasants' War. The insurrection was 
at last quelled, and ended with the execution 
of the false Peter at Moscow. 

In the midst of these distractions and 
labors, while fighting the Ottoman Empire 
for the shores of the Black Sea, and all 
Europe over a partition of Poland, the Em- 
press was at the same time introducing re- 
forms in every department of her incoherent 
and disordered empire. Peter the Great had 
abolished the Patriarchate. She did more. 
The monasteries and the ecclesiastical estates, 
which were exempt from taxes during all the 
period of Mongol dominion, had never paid 
tribute to Khans, had in consequence grown 
to be enormously wealthy. It is said the 
clergy owned a million serfs. Catherine 
placed the property of the Church under the 



l6o EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

administration of a secular commission, and 
the heads of the monasteries and the clergy 
were converted from independent sovereigns 
into mere pensioners of the Crown. Then she 
assailed the receiving of bribes, and other 
corrupt practices in the administration of jus- 
tice. She struggled hard to let in the light of 
better instruction upon the upper and middle 
classes. If she could, she would have abol- 
ished ignorance and cruelty in the land, not 
because she was a philanthropist, but because 
she loved civilization. It was her intellect, 
not her heart, that made Catherine a reformer. 
When she severely punished and forever dis- 
graced a lady of high rank for cruelty to her 
serfs, — forty of whom had been tortured to 
death, — it was because she had the educated 
instincts of a European, not an Asiatic, and 
she had also the intelligence to realize that 
no state could be made sound which rested 
upon a foundation of human misery. She 
established a Russian Academy modeled 
after the French, its object being to fix the 
rules for writing and speaking the Russian 
language and to promote the study of Rus- 
sian history. In other words, Catherine was 
a reformer fully in sympathy with the best 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. i6i 

methods prevailing in Western Europe. She 
was profoundly interested in the New Philos- 
ophy and the intellectual movement in France, 
was in correspondence with Voltaire and the 
Encyclopedists, and a student of the theories 
of Rousseau. 

Of course the influence exerted by French 
genius over Russian civiHzation at this time 
did not penetrate far below the upper and 
highly educated class; but there is no doubt 
it left a deep impress upon the literature and 
art of the nation, and also modified Russian 
characteristics by introducing religious toler- 
ance and habits of courtesy, besides making 
aspirations after social justice and political 
liberty entirely respectable. Catherine's 
*' Book of Instructions " to the commission 
which was created by her to assist in making 
a new code of laws contained political max- 
ims which would satisfy advanced reformers 
to-day; although when she saw later that the 
French Revolution was their logical conclu- 
sion, she repudiated them, took Voltaire's bust 
down from its pedestal, and had it thrown into 
a rubbish heap. The work she was accom- 
plishing for Russia was second only to that of 
Peter the Great; and when she is reproached 



1 62 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

for not having done more and for not having 
broken the chains forged by Boris upon 
twenty miUion people, let it be remembered 
that she lived in the eighteenth, and not the 
nineteenth, century; and that at that very time 
Franklin and Jefiferson were framing a consti- 
tution which sanctioned the existence of ne- 
gro slavery in an ideal republic! 

A new generation had grown up in Poland, 
men not nobles nor serfs, but a race of 
patriots familiar with the stirring litera- 
ture of their century. They had seen their 
land broken into fragments and then 
ground fine by a proud and infatuated 
nobility. They had seen their pusillani- 
mous kings one after another yielding 
to the insolent demands for their territory. 
Polish territory extended eastward into the 
Ukraine; now that must be cut off and 
dropped into the lap of Russia. Another arm 
extended north, separating Eastern Prussia 
from Western. That too must be cut off and 
fall to Prussia. Then after shearing these ex- 
tremities, the Poland which was left must not 
only accept the spoliation, but co-operate with 
her despoilers in adopting under their direc- 
tion a constitution suited to its new humilia- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 163 

tion. Her King was making her the laugh- 
ing-stock of Europe — but before long the 
name Poland was to become another name for 
tragedy. Kosciusko had fought in the War 
of the American Revolution. When he re- 
turned, with the badge of the Order of the 
Cincinnati upon his breast and filled with 
dreams of the regeneration of his own land by 
the magic of this new political freedom, he 
was the chosen leader of the patriots. 

The partition of Poland was not all ac- 
compHshed at one time. It took three 
repasts to finish the banquet (the par- 
titions of 1 792- 1 793- 1 794), and then some 
time more was required to sweep up 
the fragments and to efface its name 
from the map of Europe. Kosciusko and 
his followers made their last vain and des- 
perate stand in 1794, and when he fell covered 
with wounds at the battle of Kaminski, Poland 
fell with him. The Poles were to survive only 
as a more or less unhappy element among 
nations where they were aliens. Their race 
affinities were with Russia, for they were a 
Slavonic people; their religious affinities were 
with Catholic Austria; but with Protestant 
Prussia there was not one thing in common, 



1 64 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

and that was the bitterest servitude of all. 
The Poles in Russia were to some extent 
autonomous. They were permitted to con- 
tinue their local governments under a viceroy 
appointed by the Tsar; their Slavonic system 
of communes was not disturbed, nor their 
language nor customs. Still it was only a 
privileged servitude after all, and the time was 
coming when it was to become an unmiti- 
gated one. But effaced as a political sover- 
eignty, Poland was to survive as a nationality 
of genius. Her sons were going to sing their 
songs in other lands, but Mickiewiz and Sink- 
ewiz and Chopin are Polish, not Russian. 

The alliance of the three sovereigns en- 
gaged in this dismemberment was about as 
friendly as is that of three dogs who have run 
down a hare and are engaged in picking nice 
morsels from its bones. If Russia was getting 
more than her share, the Turks would be in- 
cited by Austria or Prussia to attack her in 
the South; and many times did Catherine's 
armies desert Poland to march down and de- 
fend the Crimea, and her new fort at Sebas- 
topol, and her fleet on the Black Sea. In 
1787, accompanied by her grandsons, the 
Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine, she 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 165 

made that famous journey down the Dnieper; 
visited the ancient shrines about Kief; stood 
in the picturesque old capital of Sarai, on the 
spot where Russian Grand Princes had 
groveled at the feet of the Khans; and then 
looked upon Sebastopol, which marked the 
limit of the new frontier which she had 
created. 

The French Revolution caused a revulsion 
in her political theories. She indulged in no 
more abstractions about human rights, and 
had an antipathy for the new principles which 
had led to the execution of the King and 
Queen and to such revolting horrors. She 
made a holocaust of the literature she had once 
thought entertaining. Russians suspected of 
liberal tendencies were watched, and upon the 
sHghtest pretext sent to Siberia, and she urged 
the King of Sweden to head a crusade against 
this pestilential democracy, which she would 
help him to sweep out of Europe. It was 
Catherine, in consultation with the Emperor 
of Austria, who first talked of dismembering 
Turkey and creating out of its own territory 
a group of neutral states lying between Eu- 
rope and the Ottoman Empire. And Vol- 
taire's dream of a union of the Greek peoples 



1 66 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

into an Hellenic kingdom she improved upon 
by a larger plan of her own, by which she was 
to be the conqueror of the Ottoman Empire, 
while her grandson Constantine, sitting on a 
throne at Constantinople, should rule Greeks 
and Turks alike under a Russian protectorate. 
Upon the private life of Catherine there is 
no need to dwell. This is not the biography 
of a woman, but the history of the empire she 
magnificently ruled for thirty-four years. It 
is enough to say she was not better than her 
predecessors, the Tsaritsas Elizabeth and 
Anna. The influence exerted by Menschikof 
in the reign of Catherine I., and Biron in that 
of Anna, was to be exerted by Alexis Orlof, 
Potemkin, and other favorites in this. Her 
son Paul, who was apparently an object of 
dislike, was kept in humiliating subordination 
to the Orlofs and her other princely favorites, 
to whose councils he was never invited. 
Righteousness and moral elevation did not 
exist in her character nor in her reign; but for 
political insight, breadth of statesmanship, and 
a powerful grasp upon the enormous problems 
in her heterogeneous empire, she is entitled to 
rank with the few sovereigns who are called 
" Great." A German by birth, a French- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 167 

woman by intellectual tastes and tendencies — 
she was above all else a Russian, and bent all 
the resources of her powerful personality to 
the enlightenment and advancement of the 
land of her adoption. Her people were not 
" knouted into civilization," but invited and 
drawn into it. Her touch was terribly firm — 
but elastic. She was arbitrary, but tolerant; 
and if her reign was a despotism, it was a des- 
potism of that broad type which deals with the 
sources of things, and does not bear heavily 
upon individuals. The Empress Catherine 
died suddenly in 1796, and Paul I. was 
crowned Emperor of Russia. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

Paul was forty-one years old when he as- 
cended the throne he had for twenty years 
beheved was rightfully his. The mystery sur- 
rounding the death of his father Peter III., 
the humiliations he had suffered at his 
mother's court, and what he considered her 
usurpation of his rights — all these had been 
for years fermenting in his narrow brain. 

His first act gave vent to his long-smoth- 
ered indignation and his suspicions regard- 
ing his father's death. Peter's remains were 
exhumed — placed beside those of Catherine 
lying in state, to share all the honors of her 
obsequies and to be entombed with her; while 
Alexis Orlof, his supposed murderer, was 
compelled to march beside the coffin, bearing 
his crown. 

Then when Paul had abolished from the 
official language the words " society " and 
'' citizen," which his mother had delighted to 
honor — when he had forbidden the wearing of 

i68 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 169 

frock-coats, high collars, and neckties, and re- 
fused to allow Frenchmen to enter his terri- 
tory — and when he had compelled his people 
to get out of their carriages and kneel in the 
mud as he passed — he supposed he was 
strengthening the foundations of authority 
which Catherine II. had loosened. 

To him is attributed the famous saying, 
" Know that the only person of consideration 
in Russia is the person whom I address, and 
he only during the time I am addressing him." 
He was a born despot, and his reforms con- 
sisted in a return to Prussian methods and to 
an Oriental servility. The policy he an- 
nounced was one of peace with Europe — a 
cessation of those wars by which his mother 
had for thirty-four years been draining the 
treasury. He was going to turn his conquests 
toward the East; and vast plans, with vague 
and indefinite outlines, were forming in the 
narrow confines of his restless brain. But 
these were interrupted by unexpected condi- 
tions. 

In 1796 the military genius of a young 
man twenty-seven years old electrified Europe. 
Napoleon Bonaparte, at the head of a ragged, 
unpaid French army, overthrew Northern 



I70 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

Italy, and out of the fragments created a 
Cisalpine Republic. His army already occu- 
pied Egypt, and by the Treaty of Formio 
possessed the Ionian Isles. This threatened 
the East. So Turkey and Russia, contrary to 
all old traditions, formed a defensive alliance, 
which was quickly followed by an offensive 
one between Russia and Austria. But the 
tactics so successful against Poles and Turks 
were unavailing against those employed by 
the new Conqueror. The Russian com- 
mander Suvorov was defeated and returned in 
disgrace to his enraged master at St. Peters- 
burg, who refused to receive him. In 1798 
Bonaparte had secured Belgium, had com- 
pelled Austria to cede to him Lombardy, also 
to promise him help in getting the left bank 
of the Rhine from the Germanic body, and to 
acknowledge his Cisalpine Republic. 

The Emperor Paul's feelings underwent a 
swift change. He was blinded by the glory 
of Napoleon's conquests and pleased with his 
despotic methods. He conceived not only a 
friendship but a passion for the man who 
could accomplish such things. Austria and 
England had both offended him, so he readily 
fell into a plan for a Franco-Russian under- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 171 

Standing for mutual benefit, from which there 
developed a larger plan. 

The object of this was the overthrow of 
British dominion in India. Paul was to move 
with a large army into Hindostan, there to be 
joined by a French army from Egypt; then 
they would together sweep through the coun- 
try of the Great Mogul, gathering up the 
English settlements by the way and so placat- 
ing the native population and Princes that 
they would join them in the liberation of their 
country from English tyranny and usurpation. 
Paul said in his manifesto to the army that 
the Great Mogul and the Sovereign Princes 
were to be undisturbed; nothing was to be 
attacked but the commercial establishments 
acquired by money and used to oppress and 
to enslave India. At the same time he said 
to his army, " The treasures of the Indies shall 
be your recompense," failing to state how 
these treasures were to be obtained without 
disturbing the Sovereign Princes. 

It is known that Napoleon had plans of an 
empire in the East, and it is also known that 
some compact of this kind did exist between 
him and the Emperor Paul. In 1801 eleven 
regiments of Cossacks, the vanguard of the 



1 72 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

army which was to follow, had started upon 
the great undertaking, when news was 
received that the Emperor Paul I. was 
dead. 

The unbalanced course pursued by the 
Tsar, his unwise reforms, and his capricious 
policy had not only ahenated everyone, but 
caused serious apprehensions for the safety of 
the empire. He had arrayed himself against 
his wife and his children; had threatened to 
disinherit Alexander, his oldest son and heir, 
whom he especially hated. A plot was formed 
to compel his abdication. To that extent his 
sons Alexander and Constantine were aware 
of and party to it. 

On the night of the 23d of March, 1801, the 
conspirators entered Paul's sleeping apart- 
ment after he had retired, and, sword in hand, 
presented the abdication for him to sign. 
There was a struggle in which the lamp was 
overturned, and in the darkness the Tsar, 
who had fallen upon the floor, was strangled 
with an officer's scarf. 

On the 24th of March, 1801, Alexander, 
who was entirely innocent of complicity in 
this crime, was proclaimed Emperor of Rus- 
sia. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. I73 

It is said that when Bonaparte saw the 
downfall of his vast design, he could not con- 
tain his rage; and pointing to England as the 
instigator of the deed, he said in the Moniteur: 
" It is for history to clear up the secret of this 
tragedy, and to say what national policy was 
interested in such a catastrophe! " 

The Emperor Paul had an acute, although 
narrow, intelligence, and was not without 
generous impulses. But although he some- 
times made impetuous reparation for injury, 
although he recalled exiles from Siberia and 
gave to Kosciusko and other patriots their 
freedom, unless his kindness was properly met 
the reaction toward severity was excessive. 
A little leaven of good with much that is evil 
sometimes creates a very explosive mixture, 
and converts what would be a mild, even 
tyranny into a vindictive and revengeful one. 
When we behold the traits exhibited dur- 
ing this brief reign of five years, we are 
not surprised at Catherine's unwillingness to 
resign to her son the empire for which she had 
done so much; and we are inclined to believe 
it is true that there was, as has been rumored, 
a will left by the Empress naming as her 
heir the grandson whom she had carefully 



174 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

prepared to be her successor, and that this 
paper was destroyed by the conspirators. 

There is one wise act to record in the reign 
of Paul — although it was probably prompted 
not by a desire to benefit the future so much 
as to reverse the past. Peter the Great had 
placed in the hands of the Sovereign the power 
to choose his successor. Paul established the 
principle of primogeniture in the succession, 
and thereby bestowed a great benefit upon 
Russia. 



CHAPTER XX. 

A YOUTH of twenty-five years was Tsar and 
Autocrat of All the Russias. ^Alexander had 
from his birth been withdrawn entirely from 
his father's influence. The tutor chosen by 
his grandmother was Laharpe, a Swiss Re- 
publican, and the principles of political free- 
dom were at the foundation of his training. 
It was of course during the period of her own 
liberal tendencies that Alexander was imbued 
with the advanced theories which had cap- 
tured intellectual Europe in the days before 
the French Revolution. The new Emperor 
declared in a manifesto that his reign should 
be inspired by the aims and principles of 
Catherine 11. He then quickly freed him- 
self from the conspirators who had murdered 
his father, and drew about him a group of 
young men Hke himself, utterly inexperienced, 
but enthusiastic dreamers of a reign of good- 
will which should regenerate Russia. With 
the utmost confidence, reforms of the most 

175 



176 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

radical nature were proposed and discussed. 
There was to be a gradual emancipation of the 
serfs, and misery of all sorts to be lifted from 
the land by a new and benign system of gov- 
ernment which should be representative and 
constitutional. Many changes were at once 
instituted. The old system of '' colleges," or 
departments, established by Peter the Great 
was removed and a group of ministers after 
the European custom constituted the Tsar's 
official household, or what would once have 
been called his Drujina. In the very first 
year of this reign there was a large accession 
of territory in Asia, which gravitated as if by 
natural law toward the huge mass. The pic- 
turesque old kingdom of Georgia, lying south 
of the Caucasus between the Black and Cas- 
pean seas, was the home of that fair and gifted 
race which had fallen from its high estate and 
become the victim of the Turks, and, with its 
congener Circassia, had long provided the 
harems of the Ottoman Empire with beautiful 
slaves. The Georgians had often appealed to 
the Tsars for protection, and in 1800 the suf- 
fering kingdom was glad to be incorporated 
with Russia. 

So day by day, while the young Emperor 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. I77 

and his friends were living in their pleasant 
Utopia, Russia, with all its incoherent ele- 
ments, with its vast energies, its vast riches, 
and its vast miseries, was expanding and as- 
suming a more dominating position in Eu- 
rope. What would be done at St. Petersburg, 
was the question of supreme importance; and 
Alexander was being importuned to join the 
coalition against the common enemy Bona- 
parte. 

The night before the 2d of October, 1805, 
the Russian Emperor and his young olificers, 
as confident of victory as they were of their 
ability to reconstruct Russia, were impatiently 
waiting for the morrow, and the conflict at 
Austerlitz. With a ridiculous assurance the 
young Alexander sent by the young Prince 
Dolgoruki a note addressed — not to the Em- 
peror — but to the '' Head of the French 
Nation," stating his demands for the abandon- 
ment of Italy and immediate peace! Before 
sundown the next day the '' Battle of the 
Three Emperors " had been fought; the Rus- 
sian army was scattered after frightful loss, 
and Alexander, attended by an orderly and 
two Cossacks, was galloping away as fast as 
his horse could carry him. Then Napoleon 



178 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

was in Vienna — Francis II. at his bidding took 
off his imperial crown — the '' Confederation 
of the Rhine " was formed out of Germanic 
States; and then the terrible and invincible 
man turned toward Prussia, defeated a Rus- 
sian army which came to its rescue, and in 
1806 was in BerHn — master and arbiter of 
Europe! 

Alexander, the romantic champion of right 
and justice, the dreamer of ideal dreams, had 
been carried by the whirlpool of events into 
currents too strong for him. He stood alone 
on the continent of Europe face to face with 
the man who was subjugating it. His army 
was broken in pieces, and perhaps an invasion 
of his own empire was at hand. Should he 
make terms with this man whose career had 
so revolted him? — or should he defy him and 
accept the risk of an invasion, which, by offer- 
ing freedom to the serfs and independence to 
the Poles, might give the invader the imme- 
diate support of millions of his own subjects? 
Then added to the conflict with his old self, 
there was the irresistible magic of Napoleon^s 
personal influence. A two-hours' interview 
on the raft at Tilsit — June 25, 1807 — changed 
the whole direction of Alexander's policy, and 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 1 79 

made him an ally of the despot he had de- 
tested, whom he now joined in determining 
the fate of Europe. Together they decided 
who should occupy thrones and who should 
not; to whom there should be recompense, 
and who should be despoiled; and the Em- 
peror of Russia consented to join the Empe- 
ror of the French in a war upon the com- 
mercial prosperity of England — his old friend 
and ally — by means of a continental blockade. 

Times were changed. It was not so long 
ago — just one hundred years — since Peter the 
Great had opened one small window for the 
light from civilized Europe to glimmer 
through ; and now the Tsar of that same Rus- 
sia, in a two-hours' interview on a raft, was 
deciding what should be the fate of Europe! 

The Emperor's young companions, with 
small experience and lofty aims, were keenly 
disappointed in him. This alliance was in 
contravention of all their ideals. He began 
to grow distrustful and cold toward them, 
leaning entirely upon Speranski, his prime 
minister, who was French in his sympathies 
and a profound admirer of Napoleon. Alex- 
ander, no less zealous for reforms than before, 
hurt at the defection of his friends and trying 



i8o EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

to justify himself to himself, said '' Does not 
this man represent the new forces in conflict 
with the old? " But he was not at ease. He 
and his minister worked laboriously; a system- 
atic plan of reform was prepared. Speranski 
considered the Code Napoleon the model of 
all progressive legislation. Its adoption was 
desired, but it was suited only to a homogen- 
eous people; it was a modern garment and not 
to be worn by a nation in which feudalism 
lingered, in which there was not a perfect 
equality before the law; hence the emancipa- 
tion of the serfs must be the corner-stone of 
the new structure. The difficulties grew 
larger as they were approached. He had dis- 
appointed his old friends, his nobility was 
dissatisfied, and a general feeling of irritation 
prevailed upon finding themselves involved 
by the Franco-Russian alliance in wars with 
England, Austria, and Sweden, and the pros- 
perity of the empire seriously impaired by the 
continental blockade. But when Bonaparte 
began to show scant courtesy to his Russian 
ally, and to act as if he were his master, then 
Alexander's disenchantment was complete. 
He freed himself from the unnatural alliance, 
and faced the inevitable consequences. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. iSl 

Napoleon, also glad to be freed from a sen- 
timental friendship not at all to his taste, pre- 
pared to carry out his long-contemplated de- 
sign. In July of 1812, by way of Poland, he 
entered Russia with an army of over 678,000 
souls. It was a human avalanche collected 
mainly from the people he had conquered, 
with which he intended to overwhelm the 
Russian Empire. It was of little consequence 
that thirty or forty thousand fell as this or that 
town was captured by the way. He had ex- 
pected victory to be costly, and on he pressed 
with diminished numbers toward Moscow, 
armies retreating and villages burning before 
him. If St. Petersburg was the brain of Rus- 
sia, Moscow — Moscow the Holy — was its 
heart! What should they do? Should they 
lure the French army on to its destruction 
and then burn and retreat? or should they 
there take their stand and sacrifice the last 
army of Russia to save Moscow? With 
tears streaming down their cheeks they 
yielded to the words of Kutuzof, who said: 
" When it becomes a matter of the salvation 
of Russia, Moscow is only a city like any 
other. Let us retreat." The archives and 
treasures of the churches and palaces were 



1 82 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

carried to Valdimir, such as could of the 
people following them, and the city was left 
to its fate. 

On September the 14th, 181 2, the French 
troops defiled through the streets of Moscow 
singing the Marseillaise, and Napoleon estab- 
lished himself in the ancient palace of the 
Ivans within the walls of the Kremlin. The 
torches had been distributed, and were in the 
hands of the Muscovites. The stores of 
brandy, and boats loaded with alcohol, were 
simultaneously ignited, and a fierce confla- 
gration like a sea of flame raged below the 
Kremlin. Napoleon, compelled to force his 
way through these volcanic fires, narrowly 
escaped. 

For five days they continued, devouring 
supplies and everything upon which the army 
had depended for shelter and subsistence. 
For thirty-five days more they waited among 
the blackened ruins. All was over with the 
French conquest. The troops were eating 
their horses, and thousands were already 
perishing with hunger. Then the elements 
began to fight for Russia — the snow-flakes 
came, then the bitter polar winds, cutting like 
a razor; and a winding sheet of snow envel- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 183 

Oped the land. On the 13th of October, after 
Hghting a mme under the Kremhn,with sullen 
rage the French troops marched out of Mos- 
cow. The Great Tower of Ivan erected 
by Boris was cracked and some portions of 
palaces and gateways destroyed by this vic- 
ious and useless act of revenge. 

Then, instead of marching upon St. Peters- 
burg as he had expected, Napoleon escaped 
alone to the frontier, leaving his perishing 
wreck of an army to get back as it could. 
The peasantry, the muzhiks, whom the Rus- 
sians had feared to trust — infuriated by the 
destruction of their homes, committed awful 
atrocities upon the starving, freezing soldiers, 
who, maddened by cold and hunger and by 
the singing in their ears of the rarified air, 
many of them leaped into the bivouac fires. 
It was a colossal tragedy. Of the 678,000 
soldiers only 80,000 ever returned. 

The extinction of the grand army of inva- 
sion was complete. But in the following year, 
with another great army, the indomitable 
Napoleon was conducting a campaign in Ger- 
many which ended with the final defeat at 
Leipzig — then the march upon Paris — and in 
March, 18 14, Alexander at the head of the 



184 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

Allies was in the French capital, dictating the 
terms of surrender. This young man had 
played the most brilliant part in the great 
drama of Liberation. He was hailed as a 
Deliverer, and exerted a more powerful in- 
fluence than any of the other sovereigns, in 
the long period required for rearranging 
Europe after the passing of Napoleon — the 
disturber of the peace of the world. 

In 1809 Sweden had surrendered to Russia 
Finland, which had belonged to that country 
for six centuries. The kindly-intentioned 
Alexander conceded to the Finns many privi- 
leges similar to those enjoyed by Poland, 
which until recent years have not been 
seriously interfered with. He guaranteed 
to them a Diet, a separate army, and the 
continuance of their own language and cus- 
toms. A ukase just issued by the present 
emperor seriously invades these privileges, 
and a forcible Russification of Finland threat- 
ens to bring a wave of Finnish emigration to 
America (1899). 

When the Emperor Alexander returned 
after the Treaty of Paris he was thirty-four 
years old. Many of the illusions of his youth 
had faded. His marriage with Elizabeth of 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 185 

Baden was unhappy. His plans for reform 
had not been understood by the people whom 
they were intended to benefit. He had 
yielded finally to the demands of his angry 
nobility, had dismissed his liberal adviser 
Speranski and substituted Araktcheef, an 
intolerant, reactionary leader. He grew 
morose, gloomy, and suspicious, and a 
reign of extreme severity under Araktcheef 
commenced. In 1819 he consented to 
join in a league with Austria and Prus- 
sia for the purpose of suppressing the 
very tendencies he himself had once pro- 
moted. The League was called the '' Holy 
Alliance," and its object was to reinstate the 
principle of the divine right of Kings and to 
destroy democratic tendencies in the germ. 
Araktcheef's severities, directed against the 
lower classes and the peasantry, produced 
more serious disorders than had yet devel- 
oped. There were popular uprisings, and in 
1823 at Kief there was held secretly a conven- 
tion at which the people were told that '' the 
obstacle to their liberties was the Romanofif 
dynasty. They must shrink from nothing — 
not from the murder of the Emperor, nor the 
extermination of the Imperial family." The 



1 86 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

peasants were promised freedom if they would 
join in the plot, and a definite time was pro- 
posed for the assassination of Alexander when 
he should inspect the troops in the Ukraine in 
1824. 

When the Tsar heard of this conspiracy in 
the South he exclaimed: "Ah, the monsters! 
And I planned for nothing- but their happi- 
ness!" He brooded over his lost illusions 
and his father's assassination. His health 
became seriously disordered, and he was ad- 
vised to go to the South for change of climate. 
At Taganrog, on the ist of December, 1825, 
he suddenly expired. Almost his last words 
were: " They may say of me what they will, 
but I have lived and shall die republican." A 
statement difficult to accept, regarding a 
man who helped to create the '' Holy Alli- 
ance." 



CHAPTER XXI. 

As Alexander left no sons, by the law of 
primogeniture his brother Constantine, the 
next oldest in the family of Paul L, should 
have been his successor. But Constantine 
had already privately renounced the throne 
in favor of his brother Nicholas. The 
actual reason for this renunciation was the 
Grand Duke's deep attachment to a Polish 
lady for whom he was willing even to re- 
linquish a crown. The letter announcing 
his intention contained these words: " Be- 
ing conscious that I have neither genius, 
talents, nor energy necessary for my ele- 
vation, I beg your Imperial Majesty to trans- 
fer this right to my brother Nicholas, the 
next in succession." The document accept- 
ing the renunciation and acknowledging 
Nicholas as his successor was safely deposited 
by Alexander, its existence remaining a pro- 
found secret even to Nicholas himself. 

At the time of the Emperor's death Con- 

187 



1 88 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

stantine, who was Viceroy of Poland, was re- 
siding at Cracow. Nicholas, unaware of the 
circumstances, immediately took the oath of 
allegiance to his brother and also adminis- 
tered it to the troops at St. Petersburg. It 
required some time for Constantine's letter to 
arrive, stating his immovable determination 
to abide by the decision which would be 
found in his letter to the late Emperor. There 
followed a contest of generosity — Nicholas 
urging and protesting, and his brother re- 
fusing the elevation. Three weeks passed — 
weeks of disastrous uncertainty — with no 
acknowledged head to the Empire. 

Such an opportunity was not to be neg- 
lected by the revolutionists in the South nor 
their co-workers in the North. Pestel, the 
leader, had long been organizing his recruits, 
and St. Petersburg and Moscow were the cen- 
ters of secret political societies. The time for 
action had unexpectedly come. There must 
be a swift overturning: the entire imperial 
family must be destroyed, and the Senate 
and Holy Synod must be compelled to adopt 
the Constitution which had been prepared. 

The hour appointed for the beginning of 
this direful programme was the day when the 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 189 

senators and the troops should assemble to 
take the oath of allegiance to Nicholas. The 
soldiers, who knew nothing of the plot, were 
incited to refuse to take the oath on the 
ground that Constantine's resignation was 
false, and that he was a prisoner and in chains. 
Constantine was their friend and going to in- 
crease their pay. One Moscow regiment 
openly shouted: '' Long life to Constantine! " 
and when a few conspirators cried " Long live 
the Constitution!" the soldiers asked if that 
was Constantine's wife. So the ostensible 
cause of the revolt, which soon became gen- 
eral, was a fideHty to their rightful Emperor, 
who was being illegally deposed. Under this 
mask worked Pestel and his co-conspirators, 
composed in large measure of men of high 
intelligence and standing, including even 
government officials and members of the aris- 
tocracy. 

A few days were sufficient to overcome this 
abortive attempt at revolution in Russia. 
Pestel, when he heard his death sentence, said, 
" My greatest error ^'s that I tried to gather 
the harvest before sowing the seed "; and 
Ruileef, " I knew this enterprise would be my 
destruction — but could no longer endure the 



190 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

sight of my country's anguish under despot- 
ism." When we think of the magnitude of 
the ofifense, the monstrous crime which was 
contemplated; and when we remember that 
Nicholas was by nature the very incarnation 
of unrestrained authority, the punishment 
seems comparatively light. There was no 
vindictiveness, no wholesale slaughter. Five 
leaders were deliberately and ignominiously 
hanged, and hundreds of their misguided 
followers and sympathizers went into per- 
petual exile in Siberia — there to expiate 
the folly of supposing that a handful 
of inexperienced enthusiasts and doctri- 
naires could in their studies create new 
and ideal conditions, and build up with 
one hand while they were recklessly destroy- 
ing with the other. Their aims were the 
abolition of serfdom, the destruction of all ex- 
isting institutions, and a perfect equaHty un- 
der a constitutional government. They were 
definite and sweeping — and so were the 
means for accomplishing them. Their be- 
nign government was going to rest upon 
crime and violence. We should call these 
men Nihilists now. There were among them 
writers and thinkers, noble souls which, un- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 191 

der the stress of oppression and sympathy, 
had gone astray. They had failed, but they 
had proved that there were men in Russia ca- 
pable of dying- for an ideal. When the cause 
had its martyrs it had become sacred — and 
though it might sleep, it would not die. 

The man sitting upon the throne of Russia 
now was not torn by conflicts between his 
ideals and inexorable circumstance. His 
natural instincts and the conditions of his em- 
pire both pointed to the same simple course — 
an unmitigated autocracy — an absolute rule 
supported by military power. Instead of 
opening wider the doors leading into Europe, 
he intended to close them, and if necessary 
even to lock them. Instead of encouraging 
his people to be more European, he was go- 
ing to be the champion of a new Pan-Slavism 
and to strive to intensify the Russian national 
traits. The time had come for this great em- 
pire to turn its face away from the West and 
toward the East, where its true interests were. 
Such a plan may not have been formulated by 
Nicholas, but such were the policies instinc- 
tively pursued from the beginning of his reign 
to its close. 

Such an attitude naturally brought him at 



192 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 

once into conflict with Turkey, with which 
country he was almost immediately at war. 
Of course no one suspected him of sentimen- 
tal sympathy when he espoused the cause of 
Greece in the picturesque struggle with the 
Turks which brought Western Europe at last 
to her rescue. It was only a part of a much 
larger plan, and when Nicholas had pro- 
claimed himself the Protector of the Ortho- 
dox Christians in the East, he had placed him- 
self in a relation to the Eastern Question 
which could be held by no other sovereign in 
Europe; for persecuted Christians in the East 
were not Catholic but Orthodox; and was not 
he the head of the Orthodox Church? It was 
to secure this first move in the game of diplo- 
macy that Russia joined England and France, 
and placed the struggling little state of Greece 
upon its feet in 1832. 

But the conditions in Western Europe were 
unfavorable to the tranquil pursuit of auto- 
cratic ends. Charles X. had presumed too far 
upon the patient submission of the French 
people. In 1830 Paris was in a state of insur- 
rection; Charles, the last of the Bourbons, had 
abdicated; and Louis Philippe, under a new 
liberal Constitution approved by the people, 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 193 

was King of the French. The indignation of 
Nicholas at this overturning was still greater 
when the epidemic of revolt spread to Bel- 
gium and to Italy, and then leaped, as such 
epidemics will, across the intervening space 
to Russian Poland. The surface calm in that 
unhappy state ruled by the Grand Duke Con- 
stantine swiftly vanished and revealed an en- 
tire people waiting for the day when, at any 
cost, they might make one more stand for 
freedom. The plan was a desperate one. It 
was to assassinate Constantine, who had re- 
linquished a throne rather than leave them; 
to induce Lithuania, their old ally, to join 
them; and to create an independent Polish 
state which would bar the Russians from en- 
tering Europe. 

In 1 83 1 the brief struggle was ended, and 
Europe had received the historic announce- 
ment, " Order reigns at Warsaw." Not only 
Warsaw, but Poland, was at the feet of the 
Emperor. Confiscations, imprisonments, and 
banishments to Siberia were the least terrible 
of the punishments. Every germ of a Polish 
nationality was destroyed — the army and the 
Diet effaced, Russian systems of taxes, justice, 
and coinage, and the metric system of weights 



194 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

and measures used in Russia were introduced, 
— the Julian Calendar superseded the one 
adopted all over the world — the University of 
Warsaw was carried to Moscow, and the Pol- 
ish language was prohibited to be taught in 
the schools. Indemnity and pardon were 
offered to those who abjured the Roman 
Catholic faith, and many were received into 
the bosom of the National Orthodox Church; 
those refusing this offer of clemency being 
subjected to great cruelties. Poland was no 
more. Polish exiles were scattered all over 
Europe. In France, Hungary, Italy, wher- 
ever there were lovers of freedom, there were 
thousands of these emigrants without a coun- 
try, living illustrations of what an unre- 
strained despotism might do, and everywhere 
intensifying the desires of patriots to achieve 
political freedom in their own lands. 

Nicholas, as the chief representative of con- 
servatism in Europe, looked upon France 
with especial aversion. Paris was the center 
of these pernicious movements which period- 
ically shook Europe to its foundations. It 
had overthrown his ally Charles X., and 
had been the direct cause of the insurrection 
in Poland which had cost him thousands of 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 1 93 

rubles and lives; and now nowhere else was 
such sympathetic welcome given to the Polish 
refugees, thousands of whom were in the 
French army. His relations with Louis Phi- 
lippe became strained, and he was looking 
about for an opportunity to manifest his ill 
will. In the meantime he addressed himself 
to what he considered the reforms in his own 
empire. He was going to establish a sort of 
political quarantine to keep out European in- 
fluences. It was forbidden to send young 
men to Western universities — the term of ab- 
sence in foreign countries was limited to five 
'years for nobles, three for Russian subjects. 
The Russian language, literature, and history 
were to be given prominence over all studies 
in the schools. German free-thought was es- 
pecially disliked by him. His instincts were 
not mistaken, for what the Encyclopedists had 
been to the Revolution of 1789, the new 
school of thought in Germany would be to 
that of 1849. So from his point of view he 
was wise in excluding philosophy from the 
universities and permitting it to be taught 
only by ecclesiastics. 

The Khedive of Egypt, who ruled under a 
Turkish protectorate^ in 1832 was at war with 



196 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

his master the Sultan. It suited the Emperor 
of Russia at this time to do the Sultan a kind- 
ness, so he joined him in bringing the Khe- 
dive to terms, and as his reward received a 
secret promise from the Porte to close the 
Dardanelles in case of war against Russia — 
to permit no foreign warships to pass through 
upon any pretext. There was indignation in 
Europe when this was known, and out of the 
whole imbroglio there came just what Nicho- 
las and his minister Nesselrode had intended 
— a joint protection of Turkey by the Great 
Powers, from which France was excluded on 
account of her avowed sympathy for the Khe- 
dive in the recent troubles. 

The great game of diplomacy had begun. 
Nicholas, for the sake of humiliating France, 
had allied himself with England, his natural 
enemy, and had assumed the part of Protector 
of an Ottoman integrity which he more than 
anyone else had tried to destroy! There were 
to be many strange roles played in this East- 
ern drama — many surprises for Christendom; 
and for Nicholas the surprise of a crushing 
defeat a few years later to which France con- 
tributed, possibly in retaliation for this hu- 
miliation. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 197 

The Ottoman Empire had reached its 
zenith in 1550 under Suleyman the Magnifi- 
cent, when, with its eastern frontier in the 
heart of Asia, its European frontier touching 
Russia and Austria, it held in its grasp Egypt, 
the northern coast of Africa, and every city 
famous in biblical and classical history. Then 
commenced a decline; and when its terrible 
Janizaries became a source of danger instead 
of defense, and when its own Sultan was com- 
pelled to destroy them in 1826 for the protec- 
tion of his empire, it was only a helpless mass 
in the throes of dissolution. 

But Turkey as a living and advancing 
power was less alarming to Europe than 
Turkey as a perishing one. Lying at the 
gateway between the East and the West, it 
occupied the most commanding strategic po- 
sition in Europe. If that position were held 
by a living instead of a dying power, that 
power would be master of the Continent. No 
one state would ever be permitted by the rest 
to reach such an ascendency; and the next al- 
ternative of a division of the territory after 
the manner of Poland, was fraught with al- 
most as much danger. The only hope for the 
peace of Europe was to keep in its integrity 



19^ EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

this crumbling wreck of a wicked, crime- 
stained old empire. Such was the policy now 
inaugurated by Russia, Great Britain, Austria, 
and Prussia; and such in brief is the '' Eastern 
Question," which for more than half a century 
has overshadowed all others in European 
diplomacy, and more than any other has 
strained the conscience and the moral sense of 
Christian nations. We wish we might say 
that one nation had been able to resist this in- 
vitation to a moral turpitude masked by dip- 
lomatic subterfuges. But there is not one. 

Although the question of the balance of 
power was of importance to all, it was Eng- 
land and Russia to whom the interests in- 
volved in the Eastern Question were most 
vital. Every year which made England's 
Indian Empire a more important possession 
also increased the necessity for her having free 
access to it; while Russian policy more and 
more revolved about an actual and a potential 
empire in the East, So just because they 
were natural enemies they became allies, each 
desiring to tie the other's hands by the princi- 
ple of Ottoman integrity. 

But daily and noiselessly the Russian out- 
posts crept toward the East; first into Persia, 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. I99 

then stretching out the left hand toward 
Khiva, pressing on through Bokhara into 
Chinese territory; and then, with a prescience 
of coming events which should make Western 
Europe tremble before such a subtle instinct 
for power, Russia obtained from the Chinese 
Emperor the privilege of establishing at Can- 
ton a school of instruction where Russian 
youths — prohibited from attending European 
universities — might learn the Chinese lan- 
guage and become familiarized with Chinese 
methods! But this was the sort of instinct 
that impels a glacier to creep surely toward 
a lower level. Not content with owning half 
of Europe and all of Northern Asia, the Rus- 
sian glacier was moving noiselessly, as all 
things must, — on the line of least resistance — 
toward the East. 

The Emperor Nicholas, who compre- 
hended so well the secret of imperial expan- 
sion, and so little understood the expanding 
qualities within his empire, was an impressive 
object to look upon. With his colossal sta- 
ture and his imposing presence, always 
tightly buttoned in his uniform, he carried 
with him an air of majesty never to be 
forgotten if once it was seen. But while he 



200 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

supposed he was extinguishing the Hving 
forces and arresting the advancing power of 
mind in his empire, a new world was matur- 
ing beneath the smooth hard surface he had 
created. The Russian intellect, in spite of all, 
was blossoming from seed scattered long be- 
fore his time. There were historians, and 
poets, and romanticists, and classicists, just as 
in the rest of Europe. There were the con- 
servative writers who felt contempt for the 
West, and for the new, and who believed 
Russia was as much better before Ivan III. 
than after, as Ivan the Great was superior 
to Peter the Great; and there were Push- 
kin and Gogol, and Koltsof and Tur- 
guenief, whom they hated, because their 
voice was the voice of the New Russia. 
Turguenief, who with smothered sense of 
Russia's oppression was then girding him- 
self for his battle with serfdom, says: " My 
proof used to come back to me from the 
censor half erased, and stained with red ink 
like blood. Ah! they were painful times!" 
But in spite of all, Russian genius was spread- 
ing its wings, and perhaps from this very re- 
pression was to come that passionate intensity 
which makes it so great. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

The Revolution of 1831 was only the mild 
precursor of the one which shook Europe to 
its foundations in 1848. It had centers wher- 
ever there were patriots and aching hearts. 
In Paris, Louis Philippe had fled at the 
sound of the word Republic, and when 
in Paris workmen were waving the national 
banner of Poland, with awakened hope, 
even that land was quivering with excite- 
ment. In Vienna the Emperor Ferdinand, 
unable to meet the storm, abdicated in 
favor of his young nephew, Francis Jo- 
seph. Hungary, obedient to the voice of 
her great patriot, Louis Kossuth, in April, 
1849, declared itself free and independent. It 
was the Hungarians who had offered the most 
encouragement and sympathy to the Poles in 
1 831; so Nicholas determined to make them 
feel the weight of his hand. Upon the pretext 
that thousands of Polish exiles — his sub- 
jects — were in the ranks of the insurgents, a 



202 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

Russian army marched into Hungary. By 
the following August the revolution was over 
— thousands of Hungarian patriots had died 
for naught, thousands more had fled to 
Turkey, and still other thousands were suffer- 
ing from Austrian vengeance administered by 
the terrible General Haynau. Francis Joseph, 
that gentle and benign sovereign, who sits to- 
day upon the throne at Vienna, subjected 
Hungary to more cruelties than had been 
'inflicted by Nicholas in Poland. Not only 
were the germs of nationality destroyed — the 
Constitution and the Diet abolished, the na- 
tional language, church, and institutions 
effaced; but revolting cruelties and execu- 
tions continued for years. Kossuth, who 
with a few other leaders, was an exile and a 
prisoner in Asia Minor, was freed by the in- 
tervention of European sentiment in 1851. 
The United States government then sent a 
frigate and conveyed him and his friends to 
America, where the great Hungarian thrilled 
the people by the magic of his eloquence in 
their own language, which he had mastered 
during his imprisonment by means of a Bible 
and a dictionary. 

It was to Russia that Austria was indebted 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 203 

for a result so satisfactory. The Emperor 
Nicholas returned to St. Petersburg, feeling 
that he had earned the everlasting gratitude 
of the young ruler Francis Joseph, little 
suspecting that he was before long to say 
of him that ''his ingratitude astonished 
Europe." 

There can be no doubt that the Emperor 
Nicholas, while he was, in common with the 
other powers, professing to desire the pres- 
ervation of Ottoman integrity, had secretly 
resolved not to leave the Eastern Question to 
posterity, but to crown his own reign by its 
solution in a way favorable to Russia. His 
position was a very strong one. By the 
Treaty of 1841 his headship as protector of 
Eastern Christendom had been acknowl- 
edged. Austria was now bound to him 
irrevocably by the tie of gratitude, and Prus- 
sia by close family ties and by sympathy. It 
was only necessary to win over England. In 
1853, in a series of private, informal interviews 
with the English ambassador, he disclosed his 
plan that there should be a confidential under- 
standing between him and Her Majesty's 
government. He said in substance: " Eng- 
land and Russia must be friends. Never was 



204 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

the necessity greater. If we agree, I have no 
soHcitude about Europe. What others think 
is really of small consequence. I am as de- 
sirous as you for the continued existence of 
the Turkish Empire. But we have on our 
hands a sick man — a very sick man: he may 
suddenly die. Is it not the part of prudence 
for us to come to an understanding regarding 
what should be done in case of such a catas- 
trophe? It may as well be understood at 
once that I should never permit an attempt to 
reconstruct a Byzantine Empire, and still less 
should I allow the partition of Turkey into 
small republics — ready-made asylums for 
Kossuths and Mazzinis and European revo- 
lutionists; and I also tell you very frankly that 
I should never permit England or any of the 
Powers to have a foothold in Constantinople. 
I am willing to bind myself also not to occupy 
it — except, perhaps, as a guardian. But I 
should have no objection to your occupying 
Egypt. I quite understand its importance to 
your government — and perhaps the island of 
Candia might suit you. I see no objection to 
that island becoming also an English pos- 
session. I do not ask for a treaty — 
only an understanding; between gen- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 205 

tlemen that is sufficient. I have no desire 
to increase my empire. It is large enough; 
but I repeat — the sick man is dying; and if 
we are taken by surprise, if proper precautions 
are not taken in advance, circumstances ma!^ 
arise which will make it necessary for me to 
occupy Constantinople." 

It was a bribe, followed by a threat. Eng- 
land coldly declined entering into any stipula- 
tions without the concurrence of the other 
Powers. Her Majesty's government could 
not be a party to a confidential arrangement 
from which it was to derive a benefit. The 
negotiations had failed. Nicholas was deeply 
incensed and disappointed. He could rely, 
however, upon Austria and Prussia. He now 
thought of Louis Napoleon, the new French 
Emperor, who was looking for recognition in 
Europe. The English ambassador was coldly 
received, and for the first time since the ab- 
dication of Charles X., the representative of 
France received a cordial greeting, and 
was intrusted with a flattering message to the 
Emperor. But France had not forgotten the 
retreat from Moscow, nor the presence of 
Alexander in Paris, nor her attempted ostra- 
cism in Europe by Nicholas himself; and, fur- 



206 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

ther, although Louis Napoleon was pleased 
with the overtures made to win his friendship, 
he was not yet quite sure which cause would 
best promote his own ends. 

Fortunately Russia had a grievance against 
Turkey. It was a very small one, but it was 
useful, and led to one of the most exciting 
crises in the history of Europe. It was a 
question of the possession of the Holy Shrines 
at Bethlehem and other places which tradition 
associates with the birth and death of Jesus 
Christ; and whether the Latin or the Greek 
monks had the right to the key of the great 
door of the Church at Bethlehem, and the 
right to place a silver star over the grotto 
where our Saviour was born. The Sultan 
had failed to carry out his promises in adjust- 
ing these disputed points. And all Europe 
trembled when the great Prince Menschikof, 
with imposing suite and threatening aspect, 
appeared at Constantinople, demanding im- 
mediate settlement of the dispute. Turkey 
was paralyzed with fright, until England sent 
her great diplomatist Lord Stratford de Red- 
cliffe — and France hers, M. de Lacour. No 
simpler question was ever submitted to more 
distinguished consideration or was watched 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 207 

with more breathless interest by five sover- 
eigns and their cabinets. In a few days all 
was settled — the questions of the shrines and 
of the possession of the key of the great door 
of the church at Bethlehem were happily 
adjusted. There were only a few '' business 
details " to arrange, and the episode would 
be closed. But the trouble was not over. 
Hidden away among the '' business de- 
tails " was the germ of a great war. The 
Emperor of Russia '' felt obliged to demand 
guarantees, formal and positive," assuring the 
security of the Greek Christians in the Sul- 
tan's dominions. He had been constituted 
the Protector of Christianity in the Turkish 
Empire, and demanded this by virtue of that 
authority. The Sultan, strengthened now by 
the presence of the English and French am- 
bassadors, absolutely refused to give such 
guarantee, appealing to the opinion of the 
world to sustain him in resisting such a vio- 
lation of bis independence and of his rights. 
In vam did Lord Stratford exchange notes 
and conferences with Count Nesselrode and 
Prince Menschikof and the Grand Vizier and 
exhaust all the arts and powers of the most 
skilled diplomacy. In July, 1853, the Rus- 



2o8 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

sian troops had invaded Turkish territory, and 
a French and EngHsh fleet soon after had 
crossed the Dardanelles, — no longer closed to 
the enemies of Russia, — had steamed by Con- 
stantinople, and was in the Bosphorus. 

Austria joined England and France in a de- 
fensive though not an offensive alliance, and 
Prussia held entirely aloof from the conflict. 

Nicholas had failed in all his calculations. 
In vain had he tried to lure England into a se- 
cret compact by the offer of Egypt — in vain 
had he preserved Hungary to Austria — in vain 
sought to attach Prussia to himself by acts 
of friendship; and his Nemesis was pursuing 
him, avenging a long series of affronts to 
France. Unsupported by a single nation, he 
was at war with three; and after a brilliant 
reign of twenty-eight years unchecked by a 
single misfortune, he was about to die, leaving 
to his empire the legacy of a disastrous war, 
which was to end in defeat and humiliation. 

But a strange thing had happened. For 
a thousand years Europe had been trying to 
drive Mohammedanism out of the continent. 
No sacrifice had been considered too great if 
it would help to rid Christendom of that great 
iniquity. Now the Turkish Empire, — the 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 209 

spiritual heir and center of this old enemy, — 
no less vicious — no less an offense to the in- 
stincts of Christendom than before, was on the 
brink of extermination. It would have been 
a surprise to Richard the lion-hearted, and to 
Louis IX. the saint, if they could have fore- 
seen what England and France would do 
eight hundred years later when such a crisis 
arrived! While the Sultan in the name of the 
Prophet was appealing to all the passions of 
a mad fanaticism to arise and '' drive out the 
foreign infidels who were assailing their holy 
faith " — there was in England an enthusiasm 
for his defense as splendid as if the cause were 
a righteous one. 

It is not a simple thing to carry a bark 
deeply loaded with treasure safely through 
swift and tortuous currents. England was 
loaded to the water's edge with treasure. Her 
hope was in that sunken wreck of an empire 
which fate had moored at the gateway leading 
to her Eastern dominions, and what she most 
feared in this world was its removal. As a 
matter of state policy, she may have followed 
the only course which was open to her; but 
viewed from a loftier standpoint, it was a com- 
promise with unrighteousness when she joined 



2IO EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

hands with the '' Great Assassin " and poured 
out the blood of her sons to keep him un- 
harmed. For fifty years that compromise has 
embarrassed her poUcy, and still continues to 
soil her fair name. In the War of the Crimea, 
England, no less than Russia, was fighting, 
not for the avowed, but unavowed ob- 
ject. But frankness is not one of the virtues 
required by diplomacy, so perhaps of that we 
have no right to complain. 

On the 4th of January, 1854, the allied 
fleets entered the Black Sea. The Emperor 
Nicholas, from his palace in St. Petersburg, 
watched the progress of events. He saw 
Menschikof vainly measuring swords with 
Lord Raglan at Odessa (April 22); then the 
overwhelming defeat at the Alma (Septem- 
ber 20); then the sinking of the Russian fleet 
to protect Sebastopol, about which the battle 
was to rage until the end of the war. He saw 
the invincible courage of his foe in that im- 
mortal act of valor, the cavalry charge at 
Balaklava (November 5), in obedience to an 
order wise when it was given, but useless and 
fatal when it was received — of which someone 
made the oft-repeated criticism — "' Cest mag- 
niiique — mats ce n'est pas la guerre.'' And 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 21 1 

then he saw the power to endure during that 
awful winter, when the elements and official 
mismanagement were fighting for him, and 
when more English troops were perishing 
from cold and neglect than had been killed by 
Russian shot and shell. 

But the immense superiority of the armies 
of the allies could not be doubted. His 
troops, vanquished at every point, were hope- 
lessly beleagured in Sebastopol. The maj- 
esty of his empire was on every side insulted, 
his ports in every sea blockaded. Never be- 
fore had he tasted the bitterness of defeat and. 
humiliation. Europe had bowed down be- 
fore him as the Agamemnon among Kings. 
He had saved Austria; had protected Prussia; 
he had made France feel the weight of his au- 
gust displeasure. Wherever autocracy had 
been insulted, there he had been its champion 
and striven to be its restorer. But ever since 
1848 there had been something in the air un- 
suited to his methods. He was the incarna- 
tion of an old principle in a new world. It 
was time for him to depart. His day had 
been a long and splendid one, but it was pass- 
ing amid clouds and darkness. 

A successful autocrat is quite a different 



212 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

person from an unsuccessful one. Nicholas 
had been seen in the shining light of invinci- 
bility. But a sudden and terrible awakening 
had come. The nation, stung by repeated 
defeats, was angry. A flood of anonymous 
literature was scattered broadcast, arraigning 
the Emperor — the administration — the minis- 
ters — the diplomats — the generals. '' Slaves, 
arise! " said one, '' and stand erect before the 
despot. We have been kept long enough in 
serfage to the successors of Tatar Khans." 

The Tsar grew gloomy and silent. *' My 
successor," he said, '' may do what he likes. 
I cannot change." When he saw Austria at 
last actually in alliance with his enemies he 
was sorely shaken. But it was the voice of 
bitter reproach and hatred from his hitherto 
silent people which shook his iron will and 
broke his heart. He no longer desired to 
live. While suffering from an influenza he 
insisted upon going out in the intense cold 
without his greatcoat and reviewing his 
guards. Five days later he dictated the dis- 
patch which was sent to every city in Russia: 
*' The Emperor is dying." 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

When his life and the hard-earned con- 
quests of centuries were together slipping 
away, the dying Emperor said to his son: " All 
my care has been to leave Russia safe without 
and prosperous within. But you see how it 
is. I am dying, and I leave you a burden 
which will be hard to bear." The young man 
upon whom fell these responsibilities was 
thirty-seven years old. His mother was Prin- 
cess Charlotte of Prussia, sister of the late 
Emperor William, who succeeded to the 
throne of Prussia, left vacant by his brother 
in 1861. 

His first words to his people were a passion- 
ate justification of his father " of blessed mem- 
ory," his aims and purposes, and a solemn dec- 
laration that he should remain true to his line 
of conduct, which '' God and history would 
vindicate." It was a man of ordinary flesh 
and blood promising to act like a man of steel. 
His own nature and the circumstances of his 

213 



214 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 

realm both forbade it. The man on the 
throne could not help listening attentively to 
the voice of the people. There must be peace. 
The country was drained of men and of 
money. There were not enough peasants left 
to till the fields. The landed proprietors with 
their serfs in the ranks were ruined, and had 
not money with which to pay the taxes, upon 
which the prosecution of a hopeless war de- 
pended. Victor Emmanuel had joined the 
allies with a Sardinian army; and the French, 
by a tremendous onslaught, had captured 
Malakof, the key to the situation in the 
Crimea. Prince Gortchakof, who had re- 
placed Prince Menschikof, was only able to 
cover a retreat with a mantle of glory. The 
end had come. 

A treaty of peace was signed March 30, 
1856. Russia renounced the claim of an ex- 
clusive protectorate over the Turkish prov- 
inces, yielded the free navigation of the 
Danube, left Turkey the Roumanian prin- 
cipalities, and, hardest of all, she lost the con- 
trol of the Black Sea. Its waters were forbid- 
den to men-of-war of all nations; no arsenals, 
military or maritime, to exist upon its shores. 
The fruits of Russian policy since Peter the 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 215 

Great were annihilated, and the work of two 
centuries of progress was canceled. 

Who and what was to blame for these ca- 
lamities? Why was it that the Russian army- 
could sucessfully compete with Turks and 
Asiatics, and not with Europeans? The 
reason began to be obvious, even to stubborn 
Russian Conservatives. A nation, in order to 
compete in war in this age, must have a grasp 
upon the arts of peace. An army drawn from 
a civilized nation is a more effective instru- 
ment than one drawn from a barbarous one. 
The time had passed when there might be a 
few highly educated and subtle intelligences 
thinking for millions of people in brutish 
ignorance. The time had arrived when it 
must be recognized that Russia was not made 
for a few great and powerful people, for whom 
the rest, an undistinguishable mass, must toil 
and suffer. In other words, it must be a 
nation — and not a dynasty nourished by 
misery and supported by military force. 

Men high in rank no longer flaunted their 
titles and insignia of office. They shrank from 
drawing attention to their share of responsi- 
bility in the great calamity, and listened al- 
most humbly to the suggestions of liberal 



2l6 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

leaders, suggestions which, a few months ago, 
none dared whisper except behind closed 
doors. A new literature sprang into life, un- 
rebuked, dealing with questions of state policy 
with a fearless freedom never before dreamed 
of. Conservative Russia had suddenly van- 
ished under a universal conviction that the 
hope of their nation was in Liberalism. 

The Emperor recalled from Siberia the 
exiles of the conspiracy of 1825, and also the 
Polish exiles of 1831. There was an honest 
efifort made to reform the wretched judicial 
system and to adopt the methods which West- 
ern experience had found were the best. The 
obstructions to European influences were re- 
moved, and all joined hands in an effort to de- 
vise means of bringing the whole people up to 
a higher standard of intelligence and well- 
being. Russia was going to be regenerated. 
Men, in a rapture of enthusiasm and with 
tears, embraced each other on the streets. 
One wrote: "The heart trembles with joy. 
Russia is like a stranded ship which the cap- 
tain and the crew are powerless to move; now 
there is to be a rising tide of national life 
which will raise and float it." 

Such was the prevailing public sentiment in 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 217 

1 86 1, when Emperor Alexander affixed his 
name to the measurewhich was going to make 
it forever glorious — the emancipation of over 
twenty-three million human beings from serf- 
dom. It would require another volume to tell 
even in outline the wrongs and sufferings of 
this class, upon whom at last rested the pros- 
perity and even the life of the nation, who, 
absolutely subject to the will of one man, 
might at his pleasure be conscripted for mili- 
tary service for a term of from thirty to forty 
years, or at his displeasure might be sent to 
Siberia to work in the mines for life; and who, 
in no place or at no time, had protection from 
any form of cruelty which the greed of the 
proprietor imposed upon them. Selling the 
peasants without the land, unsanctioned by 
law, became sanctioned by custom, until 
finally its right was recognized by imperial 
ukases, so that serfdom, which in theory pre- 
sented a mild exterior, was in practice and in 
fact a terrible and unmitigated form of hu- 
man slavery. 

Patriarchalism has a benignant sound — it 
is better than something that is worse! It is 
a step upward from a darker quagmire of hu- 
man condition. When Peter the Great, with 



2l8 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

his terrible broom, swept all the free peasants 
into the same mass with the unfree serfs, and 
when he established the empire upon a chain 
of service to be rendered to the nobility by the 
peasantry, and then to the state by the no- 
bihty, he simply aplied to the whole state the 
Slavonic principle existing in the social unit 
— the family. And while he was European- 
izing the surface, he was completing a struc- 
ture of paternalism, which was Asiatic and in- 
compatible with its new garment — an incon- 
gruity which in time must bring disorder, 
and compel radical and difficult reforms. 

To remove a foundation stone is a delicate 
and difficult operation. It needed courage of 
no ordinary sort to break up this serfdom en- 
crusted with tyrannies. It was a gigantic 
social experiment, the results of which none 
could foresee. Alexander's predecessors had 
thought and talked of it, but had not dared to 
try it. Now the time was ripe, and the man 
on the throne had the nerve required for its 
execution. 

The means by which this revolution was 
effected may be briefly described in a sen- 
tence. The Crown purchased from the pro- 
prietors the land — with the peasants attached 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 219 

to it, and then bestowed the land upon the 
peasants with the condition that for forty- 
five years they should pay to the Crown six 
per cent, interest upon the amount paid by it 
for the land. It was the commune or mir 
which accepted the land and assumed the obli- 
gation and the duty of seeing that every indi- 
vidual paid his annual share of rental (or in- 
terest money) upon the land within his in- 
closure, which was supposed to be sufficient 
for his own maintenance and the payment of 
the government tax. 

These simple people, who had been dream- 
ing of emancipation for years, as a vague 
promise of relief from sorrow, heard with as- 
tonishment that now they were expected to 
pay for their land! Had it not always be- 
longed to them? The Slavonic idea of 
ownership of land through labor was the only 
one of which they could conceive, and it had 
survived through all the centuries of serf- 
dom, when they were accustomed to say: 
" We are yours, but the land is ours." In- 
stead of twenty-five million people rejoicing 
with grateful hearts, there was a ferment of 
discontent and in some places uprisings — one 
peasant leader telling ten thousand who rose 



220 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

at his call that the Emancipation Law was a 
forgery, they were being deceived and not per- 
mitted to enjoy what the Tsar, their " Little 
Father," had intended for their happiness. 
But considering the intricate difficulties at- 
tending such a tremendous change in the so- 
cial conditions, the emancipation was easily 
effected and the Russian peasants, by the sur- 
vival of their old Patriarchal institutions, were 
at once provided with a complete system of 
local self-government in which the ancient 
Slavonic principle was unchanged. At the 
head of the commune or mir was the elder, 
a group of communes formed a Volost, and 
the head of the Volost was responsible for 
the peace and order of the community. To 
this was later added the Zemstvo a representa- 
tive assembly of peasants, for the regulation of 
local matters. 

Such a new reign of clemency awakened 
hope in Poland that it too might share these 
benefits. First it was a Constitution such as 
had been given to Hungary for which they 
prayed. Then, as Italy was emancipating 
herself, they grew bolder, and, incited by so- 
cieties of Polish exiles, all over Europe, 
demanded more: that they be given inde- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 221 

pendence. Again the hope of a Polo-Lith- 
uanian alliance, and a recovery of the lost 
Polish provinces in the Ukraine, and the re- 
establishment of an independent kingdom of 
Poland, dared to assert itself, and to invite a 
more complete destruction. 

The liberal Russians might have sympa- 
thized with the first moderate demand, but 
when by the last there was an attempt made 
upon the integrity of Russia, there was but 
one voice in the empire. So cruel and so 
vindictive was the punishment of the Poles, 
by Liberals and Conservatives alike, that 
Europe at last in 1863 protested. The Polish 
language and even alphabet were prohibited. 
Every noble in the land had been involved in 
this last conspiracy. They were ordered to 
sell their lands, and all Poles were forbidden 
to be its purchasers. Nothing of Poland was 
left which could ever rise again. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

Liberalism had received a check. In this 
outburst of severity, used to repress the free 
instincts of a once great nation, the temper of 
the Russian people had undergone a change. 
The warmth and ardor were chilled. The 
Emperor's grasp tightened. Some even 
thought that Finland ought to be Russianized 
precisely as Poland had been; but convinced 
of its loyalty, the Grand Principality was 
spared, and the privileges so graciously be- 
stowed by Alexander the First were con- 
firmed. 

While the political reforms had been 
checked by the Polish insurrection, there 
was an enormous advance in everything mak- 
ing for material prosperity. Railways and 
telegraph-wires, and an improved postal serv- 
ice, connected all the great cities in the em- 
pire, so that there was rapid and regular com- 
munication with each other and all the world. 
Factories were springing up, mines were 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 223 

working, and trade and production and arts 
and literature were all throbbing with a new 
life. 

In 1 87 1, at the conclusion of the Franco- 
Prussian War, the Emperor Alexander saw 
his uncle William the First crowned Emperor 
of a United Germany at Paris. The approval 
and the friendship of Russia at this crisis were 
essential to the new German Empire as well 
as to France. Gortchakof, the Russian Chan- 
cellor, saw his opportunity. He intimated to 
the Powers the intention of Russia to resume 
its privileges in the Black Sea, and after a 
brief diplomatic correspondence the Powers 
formally abrogated the neutralization of those 
waters; and Russia commenced to rebuild her 
ruined forts and to re-establish her naval 
power in the South. 

There had commenced to exist those close 
ties between the Russian and other reigning 
families which have made European diplo- 
macy seem almost like a family affair — al- 
though in reality exercising very little influ- 
ence upon it. Alexander himself was the son 
of one of these alliances, and had married a 
German Princess of the house of Hesse. In 
1866 his son Alexander married Princess 



224 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

Dagmar, daughter of Christian IX., King of 
Denmark, and in 1874 he gave his daughter 
Marie in marriage to Queen Victoria's second 
son Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. It was in 
the following year (1875) that Lord Beacons- 
field took advantage of a financial crisis in 
Turkey, and a financial stringency in Egypt, 
to purchase of the Khedive his half-interest 
in the Suez Canal for the sum of $20,000,000, 
which gave to England the ownership of 
nearly nine-tenths of that important link in 
the waterway leading direct to her empire in 
India. 

During all the years since 1856, there was 
one subject which had been constantly upper- 
most in the mind of England; and that one 
subject was the one above all others which 
her Prime Minister tried to make people for- 
get. It was perfectly well known when one 
after another of the Balkan states revolted 
against the Turk — first Herzegovina, then 
Montenegro, then Bosnia — that they were 
suffering the crudest oppression, and that not 
one of the Sultan's promises made to the Pow- 
ers in 1856 had been kept. But in 1876 no 
one could any longer feign ignorance. An 
insignificant outbreak in Bulgaria took place. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 225 

In answer to a telegram sent to Constantino- 
ple a body of improvised militia, called Bashi- 
Bazuks, was sent to manage the affair after 
its own fashion. The burning of seventy vil- 
lages; the massacre of fifteen thousand — some 
say forty thousand — people, chiefly women 
and children, with attendant details too re- 
volting to narrate; the subsequent exposure 
of Bulgarian maidens for sale at Philippopolis 
— all this at last secured attention. Pamph- 
lets, newspaper articles, speeches, gave voice 
to the horror of the English people. Lord 
Stratford de Redcliffe, Gladstone, John 
Bright, Carlyle, Freeman, made powerful ar- 
raignments of the government which was the 
supporter and made England the accomplice 
of Turkey in this crime. 

However much we may suspect the sin- 
cerity of Russia's solicitude regarding her co- 
religionists in the East, it must be admitted 
that the preservation of her Faith has always 
been treated — long before the existence of the 
Eastern Question — as the most vital in her 
policy. In every alliance, every negotiation, 
every treaty, it was the one thing that never 
was compromised; and Greek Christianity 
certainly holds a closer and more mystic re- 



2 26 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

lation to the government of Russia than the 
Catholic or Protestant faiths do to that of 
other lands. 

Russia girded herself to do what the best 
sentiment in England had in vain demanded. 
She declared war against Turkey in support 
of the oppressed provinces of Servia, Herze- 
govina, and Montenegro. In the month of 
April, 1877, the Russian army crossed the 
frontier. Then came the capture of Ni- 
kopolis, the repulse at Plevna, the battle of 
Shipka Pass, another and successful battle of 
Plevna, the storming of Kars, and then, the 
Balkans passed, — an advance upon Constanti- 
nople. On the 29th of January the last shot 
was fired. The Ottoman Empire had been 
shaken into submission, and was absolutely at 
the mercy of the Tsar, who dictated the fol- 
lowing terms: The erection of Bulgaria into 
an autonomous tributary principality, with a 
native Christian government; the independ- 
ence of Montenegro, Roumania, and Servia; a 
partial autonomy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 
besides a strip of territory upon the Danube 
and a large war indemnity for Russia. Such 
were the terms of the Treaty of San Stefano, 
signed in March, 1878. To the undiplomatic 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 227 

mind this seems a happy conclusion of a vexed 
question. The Balkan states were independ- 
ent — or partially so; and the Ottoman Em- 
pire, although so shorn and shaken as to be 
innocuous, still remained as a dismantled 
wreck to block the passage to the East. 

But to Beaconsfield and Bismarck and An- 
drassy, and the other plenipotentiaries who 
hastened to Berlin in June for conference, it 
was a very indiscreet proceeding, and must all 
be done over. Gortchakof was compelled to 
relinquish the advantages gained by Russia. 
"Bulgaria was cut into three pieces, one of 
which was handed to the Sultan, another made 
tributary to him, and the third to be autono- 
mous under certain restrictions. Montene- 
gro and Servia were recognized as independ- 
ent, Bosnia and Herzegovina were given to 
Austria; Bessarabia, lost by the results of the 
Crimean War, was now returned to Russia, 
together with territory about and adjacent to 
Kars. Most important of all — the Turkish 
Empire was revitalized and restored to a po- 
sition of stability and independence by the 
friendly Powers! 

So by the Treaty of Berlin England had ac- 
quired the island of Cyprus, and had com- 



2 28 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 

pelled Russia, after immense sacrifice of blood 
and treasure, to relinquish her own gains and 
to subscribe to the line of policy which she 
desired. A costly and victorious war had 
been nullified by a single diplomatic battle at 
Berlin. 

The pride of Russia was deeply wounded. 
It was openly said that the Congress was an 
outrage upon Russian sensibilities — that 
" Russian diplomacy was more destructive 
than Nihilism." 

Emperor Alexander had reached the me- 
ridian of his popularity in those days of 
promised reforms, before the Polish insurrec- 
tion came to chill the currents of his soul. 
For a long time the people would not believe 
he really intended to disappoint their hope; 
but when one reform after another was re- 
called, when one severe measure after an- 
other was enacted, and when he surrounded 
himself with conservative advisers and influ- 
ences, it was at last recognized that the single 
beneficent act history would have to record 
in this reign would be that one act of 1861. 
And now his prestige was dimmed and his 
popularity still more diminished by such a sig- 
nal diplomatic defeat at Berlin. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

The emancipation had been a disappoint- 
ment to its promoters and to the serfs them- 
selves. It was an appalHng fact that year after 
year the death-rate had alarmingly increased, 
and its cause was — starvation. In lands the 
richest in the world, tilled by a people with a 
passion for agriculture, there was not enough 
bread! The reasons for this are too complex 
to be stated here, but a few may have brief 
mention. The allotment of land bestowed 
upon each liberated serf was too small to en- 
able him to live and to pay his taxes, unless 
the harvests were always good and he was al- 
ways employed. He need not live, but his 
taxes must be paid. It required three days' 
work out of each week to do that; and if he 
had not the money when the dreaded day ar- 
rived, the tax-collector might sell his corn, 
his cattle, his farming implements, and his 
house. But reducing whole communities to 
beggary was not wise, so a better way was 

229 



23© EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

discovered, and one which entailed no dis- 
astrous economic results. He was flogged. 
The time selected for this settling of accounts 
was when the busy season was over; and 
Stepniak tells us it was not an unusual thing 
for one thousand peasants in the winter 
— in a single commune — to be awaiting 
their turn to have their taxes '' flogged 
out." Of course, before this was en- 
dured all means had been exhausted for rais- 
ing the required amount. Usury, that surest 
road to ruin, and the one ofifering the least re- 
sistance, was the one ordinarily followed. 
Thus was created that destructive class called 
Koulaks, or Mir-eaters, who, while they fat- 
tened upon the necessities of the peasantry, 
also demoralized the state by creating a 
wealthy and powerful class whom it would not 
do to offend, and whose abominable and ne- 
farious interests must not be interfered with. 
Then another sort of bondage was discov- 
ered, one very nearly approaching to serfdom. 
Wealthy proprietors would make loans to dis- 
tressed communes or to individuals, the in- 
terest of the money to be paid by the peasants 
in a stipulated number of days' work every 
week until the original amount was returned. 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 231 

Sometimes, by a clause in the contract increas- 
ing the amount in case of failure to pay at a 
certain time, the original debt, together with 
the accruing interest, would be four or five 
times doubled. And if, as was probable, the 
principal never was returned, the peasant 
worked on year after year gratuitously, in the 
helpless, hopeless bondage of debt. Nor were 
these the worst of their miseries, for there 
were the Tchinovniks — or government officials 
— who could mete out any punishment they 
pleased, could order a whole community to be 
flogged, or at any moment invoke the aid of a 
military force or even lend it to private indi- 
viduals for the subjugation of refractory 
peasants. 

And this was what they had been waiting 
and hoping for, for two centuries and a half! 
But with touching loyalty not one of them 
thought of blaming the Tsar. Their " Little 
Father," if he only knew about it, would make 
everything right. It was the nobility, the 
wicked nobility, that had brought all this mis- 
ery upon them and cheated them out of their 
happiness ! They hated the nobility for steal- 
ing from them their freedom and their land; 
and the nobiUty hated them for not being 



232 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

prosperous and happy, and for bringing fam- 
ine and misery into the state, which had been 
so kind and had emancipated them. 

As these conditions became year after year 
more aggravated acute minds in Russia were 
employed in trying to solve the great social 
problems they presented. In a land in 
which the associative principle was indige- 
nous, Socialism was a natural and inevitable 
growth. Then, exasperated by the increasing 
miseries of the peasantry, maddened by the 
sufferings of political exiles in Siberia, there 
came into existence that word of dire sig- 
nificance in Russia — Nihilism, and following 
quickly upon that, its logical sequence — An- 
archism, which, if it could, would destroy all 
the fruits of civilization. 

It was Turguenief who first applied the an- 
cient term " Nihilist " to a certain class of 
radical thinkers in Russia, whose theory of 
society, like that of the eighteenth-century 
philosophers in France, was based upon a 
negation of the principle of authority. All 
institutions, social and political, however dis- 
guised, were tyrannies, and must go. In the 
newly awakened Russian mind, this first as- 
sumed the mild form of a demand for the re- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 233 

moval of legislative tyranny, by a system of 
gradual reforms. This had failed — now the 
demand had become a mandate. The people 
must have relief. The Tsar was the one per- 
son who could bestow it, and if he would not do 
so voluntarily, he must be compelled to grant 
it. No one man had the right to wreck the 
happiness of millions of human beings. If the 
authority was centralized, so was the respon- 
sibility. Alexander's entire reign had been a 
curse— and emancipation was a delusion and 
a lie. He must yield or perish. This vicious 
and degenerate organization had its center in 
a highly educated middle class, men with nine- 
teenth-century intelligence and aspirations in 
frenzied revolt against methods suited to the 
time of the Khans. The inspiring motive was 
not love of the people, but hatred of their 
oppressors. Appeals to the peasantry 
brought small response, but the movement 
was eagerly joined by men and women from 
the highest ranks in Russia. 

Secret societies and organizations were 
everywhere at work, recruited by misguided 
enthusiasts, and by human suffering from 
all classes. Wherever there were hearts 
bruised and bleeding from official cruelty, 



234 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 

in whatever ranks, there the terrible propa- 
ganda found sympathizers, if not a home; 
men — and still more, women — from the 
highest families in the nobility secretly 
pledging themselves to the movement, until 
Russian society was honeycombed with con- 
spiracy extending even to the household 
of the Tsar. Proclamations were secretly 
issued calling upon the peasantry to arise. 
In spite of the vigilance of the police, 
similar invitations to all the Russian people 
were posted in conspicuous places — " We 
are tired of famine, tired of having our 
sons perish upon the gallows, in the mines, 
or in exile. Russia demands liberty; and if 
she cannot have liberty — she will have ven- 
geance! " 

Such was the tenor of the threats which 
made the life of Emperor Alexander a 
miserable one after 1870. He had done 
what not one of his predecessors had 
been willing to do. He had, in the face 
of the bitterest opposition, bestowed the 
gift of freedom upon 23,000,000 human 
beings. In his heart he believed he de- 
served the good-will and the gratitude of his 
subjects. How gladly would he have ruled 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 235 

over a happy empire! But what could he do? 
He had absolute power to make his people 
miserable — but none to make them happy. 
It was not his fault that he occupied a throne 
which could only be made secure by a policy 
of stern repression. It was not his fault that 
he ruled through a system so elementary, so 
crude, so utterly inadequate, that to ad- 
minister justice was an impossibility. Nor 
was it his fault that he had inherited auto- 
cratic instincts from a long line of ancestors. 
In other words, it was not his fault that he was 
the Tsar of Russia! 

The grim shadow of assassination pursued 
him wherever he went. In 1879 the imperial 
train was destroyed by mines placed beneath 
the tracks. In 1880 the imperial apartments 
in the palace of Winterhof were partially 
wrecked by similar means. Seventeen men 
marched to the gallows, regretting nothing 
except the failure of their crime; and hun- 
dreds more who were implicated in the plot 
were sent into perpetual exile in Siberia. The 
hand never relaxed — nor was the Constitution 
demanded by these atrocious means granted. 

On the 13th of March, 1881, while the Em- 
peror was driving, a bomb was thrown be- 



236 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

neath his carriage. He stepped out of the 
wreck unhurt. Then as he approached the 
assassin, who had been seized by the police, 
another was thrown. Alexander fell to the 
ground, exclaiming, ''Help me!" Terribly 
mutilated, but conscious, the dying Emperor 
was carried into his palace, and there in a few 
hours he expired. 

In the splendid obsequies of the Tsar, noth- 
ing was more touching than the placing of a 
wreath upon his bier by a deputation of peas- 
ants. It can be best described in their own 
words. The Emperor was lying in the Cathe- 
dral wrapped in a robe of ermine, beneath a 
canopy of gold and silver cloth lined with er- 
mine. '' At last we were inside the church," 
says the narrative. *' We all dropped on our 
knees and sobbed, our tears flowing like a 
stream. Oh, what grief! We rose from our 
knees, again we knelt, and again we sobbed, 
this did we three times, our hearts breaking 
beside the coffin of our benefactor. There are 
no words to express it. And what honor was 
done us! The General took our wreath, and 
placed it straightway upon the breast of our 
Little Father. Our peasants' wreath laid on 
his heart, his martyr breast — as we were in all 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 237 

his life nearest to his heart! Seeing this we 
burst again into tears. Then the General let 
us kiss his hand — and there he lay, our Tsar- 
martyr, with a calm, loving expression on his 
face — as if he, our Little Father, had fallen 
asleep." 

If anything had been needed to make the 
name Nihilism forever odious, it was this 
deed. If anything were required to reveal the 
bald wickedness of the creed of Nihilism, it 
was supplied by this aimless sacrifice of the 
one sovereign who had bestowed a colossal 
reform upon Russia. They had killed him, 
and had then marched unflinchingly to the 
gallows — and that was all — leaving others 
bound by solemn oaths to bring the same fate 
upon his successor. The whole energy of the 
organization was centered in secreting dyna- 
mite, awaiting a favorable moment for its ex- 
plosion, then dying like martyrs, leaving 
others pledged to repeat the same horror — 
and so ud inHnitum. In their detestation of 
one crime they committed a worse one. They 
conspired against the Hfe of civilization — as 
if it were not better to be ruled by despots 
than assassins, as if a bad government were 
not better than none! 



238 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

The existence of Nihilism may be ex- 
plained, though not extenuated. Can anyone 
estimate the effect upon a single human being 
to have known that a father, brother, son, 
sister, or wife has perished under the knout? 
Could such a person ever again be capable of 
reasoning calmly or sanely upon '' political re- 
forms "? If there were any slumbering tiger- 
instincts in this half-Asiatic people, was not 
this enough to awaken them? There were 
many who had suffered this, and there were 
thousands more who at that very time had 
friends, lovers, relatives, those dearer to them 
than life, who were enduring day by day the 
tortures of exile, subject to the brutal pun- 
ishments of irresponsible officials. It was this 
that had converted hundreds of the nobility 
into conspirators — this which had made So- 
phia Perovskaya, the daughter of one of the 
highest officials in the land, give the signal for 
the murder of the Emperor, and then, scorn- 
ing mercy, insist that she should have the 
privilege of dying upon the gallows with the 
rest. 

But tiger-instincts, whatever their cause, 
must be extinguished. They cannot coexist 
with civilization. Human society as consti- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 239 

tuted to-day can recognize no excuse for 
them. It forbids them — and the Nihilist is 
the Ishmael of the nineteenth century. 

The world was not surprised, and perhaps 
not even displeased, when Alexander III. 
showed a dogged determination not to be 
coerced into reforms by the assassination of 
his father nor threats of his own. His coro- 
nation, long deferred by the tragedy which 
threatened to attend it, finally took place with 
great splendor at Moscow in 1883. He then 
withdrew to his palace at Gatschina, where he 
remained practically a prisoner. Embittered 
by the recollection of the fate of his father, 
who had died in his arms, and haunted by con- 
spiracies for the destruction of himself and his 
family, he was probably the least happy man 
in his empire. His every act was a protest 
against the spirit of reform. The privileges 
so graciously bestowed upon the Grand 
Duchy of Finland by Alexander I. were for 
the first time invaded. Literature and the 
press were placed under rigorous censorship. 
The Zemstvo, his father's gift of local self- 
government to the liberated serfs, was prac- 
tically withdrawn by placing that body under 
the control of the nobility. 



240 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

It was a stern, joyless reign, without one 
act intended to make glad the hearts of the 
people. The depressing conditions in which 
he lived gradually undermined the health of 
the Emperor. He was carried in dying con- 
dition to Livadia, and there, surrounded by 
his wife and his children, he expired Novem- 
ber I, 1894. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

When Nicholas 11. , the gentle-faced young 
son of Alexander, came to the throne there 
were hopes that a new era for Russia was about 
to commence. There has been nothing yet 
to justify that hope. The austere policy pur- 
sued by his father has not been changed. The 
recent decree which has brought grief and dis- 
may into Finland is not the act of a liberal 
sovereign! A forcible Russification of that 
state has been ordered, and the press in Fin- 
land has been prohibited from censuring the 
ukase which has brought despair to the 
hearts and homes of the people. The Rus- 
sian language has been made obligatory in 
the university of Helsingfors and in the 
schools, together with other severe measures 
pointing unmistakably to a purpose of effac- 
ing the Finnish nationality — a nationality, 
too, which has never by disloyalty or insur- 
rection merited the fate of Poland. 

But if this has struck a discordant note, the 

241 



242 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

invitation to a Conference of the Nations with 
a view to a general disarmament has been one 
of thrilHng and unexpected sweetness and har- 
mony. Whether the Congress now in ses- 
sion at The Hague does or does not arrive at 
important immediate results, itS'^;ri\y^€7if^ is one 
of the most significant facts of modern times. 
It is the first step on the way to that millennial 
era of universal peace toward which a per- 
fected Christian civilization must eventually 
lead us, and it remained for an autocratic Tsar 
of Russia to sound the call and to be the 
leader in this movement. 

At the death-bed of his father, Nicholas was 
betrothed to a princess of the House of Hesse, 
whose mother was Princess Alice, daughter of 
Queen Victoria. Upon her marriage this 
Anglo-German princess was compelled to 
make a public renunciation of her own faith, 
and to accept that of her imperial consort — 
the orthodox faith of Russia. The personal 
traits of the Emperor seem so exemplary that, 
if he fails to meet the heroic needs of the hour, 
the world is disposed not to reproach him, but 
rather to feel pity for the young ruler who has 
had thrust upon him such an insoluble prob- 
lem. His character recalls somewhat that of 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 243 

his great-uncle Alexander I. We see the 
same vague aspiration after grand ideals, and 
the same despotic methods in dealing with 
things in the concrete. No general amnesty 
attended his coronation, no act of clemency 
has been extended to political exiles. Men 
and women whose hairs have whitened in Si- 
beria have not been recalled — not one thing 
done to lighten the awful load of anguish in 
his empire. It may have been unreasonable 
to have looked for reforms; but certainly it 
was not too much to expect mercy I 

What one man could reform Russia? Who 
could reform a volcano? There are frightful 
energies beneath that adamantine surface — 
energies which have been confined by a rude, 
imperfectly organized system of force; a chain- 
work of abuses roughly welded together as 
occasion required. A system created by 
emergencies^ — improvised, not grown — in 
which to remove a single abuse, endangers 
the whole. When the imprisoned forces 
tried to escape at one spot, more force was 
applied and more bands and more rivets 
brutally held them down, and were then re- 
tained as a necessary part of the system. 

On the surface is absolutism in glittering 



244 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 

completeness, and beneath that — chaoS. 
Lying at the bottom of that chaos is 
the great mass of Slavonic people un- 
developed as children — an embryonic civili- 
zation — utterly helpless and utterly miser- 
able. In the mass lying above that exists 
the mind of Russia — through which course 
streams of unduly developed intelligence 
in fierce revolt against the omnipresence 
of misery. And still above that is the 
shining, enameled surface rivaling that of 
any other nation in splendor. The Emperor 
may say with a semblance of truth Veiat c'est 
moi, but although he may combine in himself 
all the functions, judicial, legislative, and ex- 
ecutive, no channels have been supplied, no 
finely organized system provided for convey- 
ing that triple stream to the extremities. The 
living currents at the top have never reached 
the mass at the bottom — that despised but 
necessary soil in which the prosperity of the 
Empire is rooted. There has been no living 
interchange — the separated elements in Rus- 
sia have been in contact, but not in union. 

Russia is as heterogeneous in condition as 
it is in elements. It has accepted ready-made 
the methods of Greek, of Tatar and of Euro- 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 245 

pean; but has assimilated none of them; and 
Russian civilization, with its amazing quality, 
its bewildering variety of achievement in art, 
literature, diplomacy, and in every field, is not 
a natural development, but a monstrosity. 
The genius intended for a whole people seems 
to have been crowded into a few narrow 
channels. Where have men written with 
such tragic intensity? Where has there been 
music suggesting such depths of sadness and 
human passion? And who has ever told the 
story of the battle-field with such energy and 
with such thrilling reality as has Verest- 
chagin? 

The youngest among the civilizations, and 
herself still only partially civilized, Russia is 
one of the most — if not the most — important 
factor in the world-problem to-day, and the 
one with which the future seems most serious- 
ly involved. She has only just commenced 
to draw upon her vast stores of energy; 
energies which were accumulating during the 
ages when the other nations were lavishly 
spending theirs. How will this colossal force 
be used in the future? Moving silently and 
irresistibly toward the East, and guided by a 
subtle and far-reaching poHcy, who can foresee 



246 EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE, 

what will be the end, and what the ultimate 
destiny of the Empire which had its beginning 
in a small Slavonic State upon the Dnieper, 
and which, until a little more than a century 
ago, was too much of a barbarian to be ad- 
mitted into the fraternity of European States. 
The farthest removed from us in political 
ideals, Russia has in the various crises in 
our national life always been America's truest 
friend. When others apparently nearer have 
failed us, she has stood steadfastly by us. We 
can never forget it. Owning a large portion 
of the earth's surface, rich beyond calculation 
in all that makes for national wealth and pros- 
perity, with a peasantry the most confiding, 
the most loyal, the most industrious in the 
world, with intellectual power and genius in 
abundant measure, and with pride of race and 
a patriotism profound and intense, what more 
does Russia need? Only three things — that 
cruelty be abandoned; that she be made a 
homogeneous nation; and that she be per- 
mitted to live under a government capable of 
administering justice to her people. These 
she must have and do. In the coming century 
there will be no place for barbarism. There 
will be something in the air which will make 



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE. 247 

it impossible that the half of a frozen conti- 
nent shall be dedicated to the use of suffering 
human beings kept there by the will of one 
man. There will be something in the air 
which will forbid cruelty and compel mercy 
and justice, and which will make men or na- 
tions feign those virtues if they have them not. 
The antagonism between England and 
Russia has a deeper significance than appears 
on the surface. It is not the Eastern ques- 
tion, not the control of Constantinople, not 
the obtaining of concessions from China which 
is at stake. It is the question which of two 
principles shall prevail. The one represented 
by a despotism in which the people have no 
part, or the one represented by a system of 
government through which the will of the 
people freely acts. There can be but one re- 
sult in such a conflict, one answer to such 
a question. The eternal purposes are writ 
too large in the past to mistake them. 
And it is the ardent hope of America that 
Russia — that Empire which has so generously 
accorded us her friendship in our times of 
peril — may not by cataclysm from within, but 
of her own volition, place herself fully in line 
with the ideals of an advanced civilization. 



LIST OF PRINCES. 



GRAND PRINCES OP KIEF. 



Rurik, 862-879 

Oleg (Brother of Rurik, Regent), . . . 879-912 

Igor (Son of Rurik), 912-945 

Olga (Wife of Igor, Regent), .... 945-964 

Sviatoslaf, 964-972 

Vladimir (Christianized Russia, 992), . . 972-1015 

Yaroslaf (The Legislator), ... * loi 5-1054 

(Close of Heroic Period.) 

Isiaslaf, 1054-1078 

Vsevolod, 1078-1093 

Sviatopolk, 1093-1113 

Vladimir Monomakh, 1113-1125 

(Throne Disputed by Prince of Suzdal.) 

Isiaslaf, 1146-1155 

George Dolgoruki (Last Grand Prince of Kief) 1 1 55-1 169 

(Fall of Kief, 1169.) 

Andrew Bogoliubski (First Grand Prince of 

Suzdal), 1169-1174 

George II. (Dolgoruki), . . . . . 1212-1238 
Yaroslaf (Father of Alexander Nevski and 
Grandfather of Daniel, First Prince of 
Moscow), . . 1238-1246 



249 



250 LIST OF PRINCES. 

PRINCES OF MOSCOW. 

Daniel (Son of Alexander Nevski), . , 1260-1303 

Iri (George) Danielovich, .... 1303-1325 

Ivan I., 1328-1341 

Simeon (The Proud), 1341-1353 

Ivan II. (The Debonair), .... 1 353-1 359 

PRINCES OF MOSCOW AND GRAND PRINCES 
OF SUZDAL. 

Dmitri Donskoi, 1363-1389 

Vasili Dmitrievich, 1389-1425 

Vasili I. (The Blind, Prince of Moscow, Nov- 
gorod, and Suzdal), .... 1425-1462 

GRAND PRINCES OF ALL THE RUSSIAS. 

Ivan III. (The Great) 1462-1505 

Vasili II., . 1505-1533 

TSARS OF RUSSIA. 

Ivan IV. (the Terrible), 1533-1584 

Feodor Ivanovich, 1 584-1 598 

Boris Godunof (Usurper), .... 1 598-1605 

The False Dmitri, 1605-1606 

Vasili Shuiski, 1606-160 9 

Mikhail Romanoff, 1613-1645 

Alexis (Son of former and Father of Peter the 

Great), 1645-1676 

Feodor Alexievich, 1676-1682 

Ivan V. and Peter I. ), j- j ^ z- e.Q e. ^ 

^ , . ^ , \ Ivan died 1696, . . 1682-1696 

Sophia Regent, ) 

Peter I. (The Great), 1696-1725 

Catherine 1 1725-1727 



LIST OF PRINCES. 



251 



Peter II. (Son of Alexis and Grandson of Peter 

the Great and Eudoxia) 1727-1730 

Anna Ivanovna (Daughter of Ivan V., 

Niece of Peter I., 1 730-1 740 

Ivan VI.(Infant Nephew of former Sovereign), 1740-1741 
Elizabeth Petrovna (Daughter of Peter I. and 

Catherine), 1741-1761 

Peter III. (Nephew of Elizabeth Petrovna ; 

reigned five months, assassinated), . 1762 

Catherine II. (Wife of Peter III.), . . 1762-1796 

Paul I. (Son of former) 1796-1801 

Alexander I,, 1801-1825 

Nicholas I., 1825-1855 

Alexander II., 1855-1881 

Alexander III., 1881-1894 

Nicholas II., 1894- 



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